Feb 12 (Reuters) – Russia pounded Ukraine with drones and ballistic missiles overnight on Thursday, further battering its energy system and leaving tens of thousands in the capital Kyiv and the cities of Dnipro and Odesa without heat, power and water, officials said.
Russia has intensified its winter campaign of strikes on Ukraine’s power grid, plunging major cities into long periods of cold and darkness in freezing temperatures.
In Kyiv alone, around 3,500 apartment buildings were without heating on Thursday after the latest attack knocked out supplies to nearly 2,600 high-rises, on top of the 1,100 already affected by previous strikes, said Mayor Vitali Klitschko.
More than 100,000 families were without electricity, according to private energy firm DTEK, which said one of its thermal power plants had been targeted but did not disclose the location.
Two people were hurt in the attack on Kyiv, which also hit a residential building, Klitschko said.
Ukraine’s air force said Russia launched 24 ballistic missiles, one cruise missile and 219 drones overnight. Air defences downed or neutralised 16 missiles and 197 drones, it said.
KEY CITIES OF ODESA, DNIPRO ALSO HIT
Nearly 300,000 people were left without water as the attack disrupted power supplies in the southern city of Odesa, said Deputy Prime Minister Oleksiy Kuleba. He added that close to 200 buildings in the strategic Black Sea port were left without heating.
Military administration chief Serhiy Lysak said the attack also damaged an apartment building and sparked a fire that engulfed one of the city’s markets, injuring one person.
In the industrial southeastern city of Dnipro, a combined missile and drone strike wounded four people, including a baby boy and a four-year-old girl, regional governor Oleksandr Ganzha said on Telegram.
Two people were killed and six more wounded in an attack on the railway hub of Lozova in the northeastern Kharkiv region bordering Russia, prosecutors said.
Moscow has denied intentionally targeting civilians during the war although its attacks have killed thousands of them since it invaded at full scale in February 2022. Ukraine has also hit civilian targets in Russia or Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine during the war, though on a far smaller scale.
‘BLOW TO PEACE EFFORTS’
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha condemned the attack as undermining a peace push led by U.S. President Donald Trump to end the four-year war.
U.S.-backed trilateral talks between Ukraine and Russia have so far failed to resolve key differences between the two sides, while Moscow has pressed on with a battlefield offensive and attacks on Ukrainian cities.
“Each such strike is a blow to peace efforts aimed at ending the war. Russia must be forced to take diplomacy seriously and de-escalate,” Sybiha wrote on X.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Wednesday the U.S. needed to put more pressure on Russia if it wanted the war to end by summer.
(Reporting by Anna Pruchnicka, Ron Popeski and Valentyn Ogirenko; Editing by Michael Perry and Ros Russell)
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