Russia launched a wave of missile strikes across Ukraine Tuesday, leaving many cities without power, as G20 leaders met in Bali.
Ukrainian authorities said it was another planned attack targeting the country’s energy infrastructure facilities. Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration Kyrylo Tymoshenko wrote on Telegram that the energy situation across Ukraine was “critical” as a result.
The Ukrainian public broadcaster reported that the strikes were aimed Kyivthe Kyiv region, the city of Kharkiv as well as the regions of Poltava, Mykolaiv, Dnipro, Zhytomyr, Khmelnytskiy, Lviv, Volyn, Rivne, Cherkassy, Odessa, Kirovohrad and Chernihiv.
Ukraine’s state-owned energy company, Ukrenergo, said the extent of the damage was yet to be determined but emergency shutdowns “for all categories of consumers have been introduced” in the northern and central regions that have been the hardest hit. affected.
“There are ‘intakers’ in our infrastructure in all parts of the country,” Ukrenergo wrote on Telegram.
The head of Ukraine’s presidential administration, Andriy Yermak, said the attack was a response to President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s speech to the G20 on Tuesday.
The strikes were reportedly launched in waves. Yuriy Ignat, spokesman for the Ukrainian Air Defense Forces, said at 5:20 p.m. Kyiv time that more than 80 rockets had been launched and 20 were still in transit. He said the number exceeded the October 10 attacks, which had been the largest so far.
Mass strike follows Russia’s withdrawal from Kherson and the west bank of the Dnipro River last week.
“Most of the beatings were recorded in the center and north of the country. The situation in the capital is extremely difficult, special schedules of emergency closures have been introduced,” Tymoshenko said.
He added that Ukrenergo had been forced to introduce measures to balance the grid and called on Ukrainians to “use electricity sparingly and keep it going!” The terrorists will be defeated”.
Electricity would be cut in at least half of the capital, Kyiv, as well as parts of the Dnipro, Odessa, Mykolaiv and Zhytomyr regions.
Three residential buildings in Kyiv were affected, according to the city’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko. He said the buildings were in Kyiv’s Pechersk district, a residential area just north of the presidential administration. Klitschko said medics and rescuers were on their way to the scene.
Tymoshenko posted a video of a burning building in Kyiv, while Klitschko said the first body from a building was recovered by Kyiv rescuers working at one of the scenes.
At the G20 summit, Zelenskiy called on leaders to support Ukraine in ending the war on its terms – the main one being that Russian troops leave all of Ukraine, including areas it occupied in 2014.
“We will not allow Russia to wait, build up its forces, and then begin a new round of terror and global destabilization. There will be no Minsk 3, which Russia will violate immediately after the deal,” Zelenskiy said. Recent media reports have claimed that Ukraine’s allies want to avoid a protracted war and plan to start negotiations soon.
“I am convinced that the time has come when the destructive Russian war must and can be stopped,” Zelenskiy said.
The attacks came shortly after Russia’s representative at the summit, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, accused Western countries of trying to politicize the summit’s end statement by circulating a draft that said: “Most members strongly condemned the war in Ukraine and stressed that it is causing immense human suffering and exacerbating existing fragilities in the global economy.
Ukraine’s permanent representative to the UN, Sergiy Kyslytsya, described the strikes as Russia “spitting in the face” of other participants in the G20.
On Telegram, Yermak called Russian leaders “cowards who only increase the amount of compensation Ukrainians will receive from their citizens.”
He added that Russia “will not win the war, we will restore everything”, and said the situation across Ukraine was “critical” as a result.
Last week was relatively quiet across Ukraine. Since early October, Russia has launched massive strikes almost every week, mainly targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure.
In an interview on Thursday, Ukraine’s military intelligence chief Vadym Skibitsky said Russia’s resources were depleted after months of war and it was gathering its resources. “Their tactic is to save their weapons, pick targets, then carry out a mass strike.”
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