Kievans are preparing to “celebrate Christmas with candles” as large parts of Ukraine have been hit by power outages after Russia launched a new wave of rocket attacks across the country on Friday.
Russia “delivered a massive strike,” said the governor of the Kyiv region, Oleksiy Kuleba, and emergency power supplies across the country were cut off after Russian missiles hit power plants in several regions, said Deputy Head of the President’s Office, Kyrylo Tymoshenko.
According to the governor of the Nikolaev region in southern Ukraine, Vitaly Kim, up to 60 Russian missiles were seen against targets in the country.
Parts of Kyiv that were the victims of a major drone strike earlier this week have been left without power in the latest attacks. Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko earlier this month warned of an “apocalyptic” scenario for the city this winter if attacks on infrastructure continue.
Human rights lawyer Oleksandra Matviychuk posted a nostalgic photo of Kyiv flooded with Christmas lights last year and said: “Now Russian missiles are hitting Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities. We will celebrate Christmas with candles, as they did hundreds of years ago. But I’m not complaining. I still hope we don’t get air defense systems too late.”
The Nobel Peace Prize winner, who is also head of the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties, added that she was still hopeful that air defense systems would be able to withstand Russian attacks.
Ukrainian air defenses shot down 37 of 40 Russian missiles in the Kyiv region on Friday, Mikhail Shamanov, a spokesman for the military administration of the Ukrainian capital, said.
Kyiv city officials said the Ukrainian capital has witnessed “one of the largest rocket attacks” by Russian troops since they invaded Ukraine almost 10 months ago.
The eastern city of Kharkiv, home to more than a million people, was completely blacked out on Friday, as was the smaller city of Poltava in central Ukraine, Oblenergo, an energy supplier and mayor of Poltava, Oleksandr Mamay, said.
In the north of the Sumy region, the attacks caused power outages, while in the south, officials said, critical infrastructure in the Chernomorsky district of Odessa suffered damage, according to the local governor.
In Krivoy Rog, also in the south, two people were killed and 13 were injured as a result of the shelling of a residential building, Governor of the region Valentin Reznichenko wrote on Facebook.
According to city council secretary Anatoly Kurtev, 21 rockets hit the southeastern city of Zaporozhye and its environs. Lights went out in some areas, but there were no initial reports of casualties, he wrote on Telegram.
Since October, Russia has been attacking Ukraine’s energy infrastructure almost every week, cutting off power supplies across the country, even as troops fight to hold territories in the south and east that make up about a fifth of Ukraine’s territory.
Meanwhile, the Russian state news agency TASS reported that at least eight people were killed and 23 injured in an artillery attack on the village of Lantratovka in the Russian-controlled Luhansk region in eastern Ukraine.
The village of Lantratovka, a small settlement near the border with Russia, was shelled, Leonid Pasechnik said in a message on his Telegram channel.
Reports from the battlefield could not be independently verified.
Pasechnik called the attack “barbaric” and said Ukraine targeted residential areas, schools and shopping streets to “kill as many people as possible.”
There was no immediate reaction from Kyiv.
Russia-backed Luhansk officials from the Joint Command and Coordination Center — a ceasefire monitoring facility set up to manage the post-2014 conflict between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian forces — said three US-made HIMARS missiles were scheduled to launch Lantratovka at 4 a.m. . 10:00 (02:10 GMT) on Friday.
The head of the “People’s Militia” in Lugansk also said on his Telegram channel that a civilian was killed as a result of Ukrainian shelling in the city of Svatovo on Friday morning.
On February 24, Russia launched a “special military operation” to disarm and “denazify” its neighbor as thousands were killed, cities destroyed and millions forced to flee their homes in what the West sees as an imperial-style land grab.
With the invasion now 10 months old, European Union leaders on Thursday agreed to provide Ukraine with 18 billion euros in funding next year and hit Moscow with a ninth round of sanctions.
Additional agency reporting
Source: I News
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