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Russia has made a targeted attack on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, hitting multiple sites before dawn on Friday in the second consecutive day of major missile strikes on the country.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Moscow had bombarded Ukraine with about 90 ballistic and cruise missiles and more than 60 Iran-made Shahed drones, targeting “power plants and energy supply lines, a hydroelectric dam, ordinary residential buildings, even a trolleybus”.
Zelenskyy blasted Ukraine’s western partners over their “indecision” and “delays” in providing the country with critical military assistance and specifically asked for more American-made Patriot air defence systems.
“There are no delays in Russian missiles, unlike aid packages to our state. Shaheds have no indecision, unlike some politicians,” Zelenskyy said, in an apparent swipe at the US Congress, which has held up a critical $60bn military assistance package for Ukraine.
His comments came after reports emerged that the US had warned Ukraine to halt attacks on Russia’s energy infrastructure. Washington had warned Kyiv that long-range strikes deep inside Russia risked driving up global oil prices and provoking retaliation, three people familiar with the discussions told the Financial Times.
A separate missile attack on Kyiv on Thursday injured 10 people, with two hospitalised, according to the city’s mayor, in the first air attack on the capital in several weeks.
The attacks followed threats on Wednesday from President Vladimir Putin, who vowed to target civilian infrastructure in Ukraine — something Russia has done throughout the war but normally denies doing — in response to a recent series of raids in the Belgorod region of Russia by anti-Putin Russian militias backed by Kyiv.
“I have spoken about why the enemy is taking such actions. Of course, we could respond in the same way,” Putin said. “We can hit civilian infrastructure and all other facilities of the same kind. We have our views on this, and our plans.”
Ukraine’s energy minister German Galushchenko said on Friday morning that Russia was “carrying out the largest-scale attack on the Ukrainian energy industry in recent times”.
“The goal is not just to damage but to try again, like last year, to cause a large-scale failure in the operation of the country’s energy system,” he said.
Russia targeted Ukraine’s power facilities in the winter of 2022 and 2023, plunging parts of Kyiv and other cities into cold and darkness, sometimes for hours or days.
Galushchenko on Friday reported damage to power generation facilities and transmission and distribution systems in many regions of Ukraine.
Several power facilities were damaged in the south-east Dnipropetrovsk region, including the Dnipro Hydroelectric Power Plant, one of Europe’s largest such plants and dams. Images posted online showed fire and smoke rising from the facility, and local authorities said the road crossing was closed.
Ukrhydroenergo, the state-owned manager of Ukraine’s hydropower plants, said the dam remained intact and that the situation was “under control”.
About 15 explosions were heard in eastern Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city, with missiles striking power facilities and causing a widespread blackout, its mayor Ihor Terekhov said. There were also problems with Kharkiv’s water supply after a pumping station was hit, he added.
City and regional officials in the southern city of Zaporizhzhia reported eight missile strikes on civilian objects. The mayor of the central city of Vinnytsia, Serhiy Borzov, said “critical infrastructure” was damaged by air strikes there. Oleksandr Vilkul, mayor of Kryvyi Rih, also reported explosions in his city. Authorities in western Lviv said fires had broken out due to hits on facilities in the far west of Ukraine.