Kiev: Russian air strikes have destroyed about 30 per cent of Ukraine’s power stations in just one week leaving the country’s energy situation ‘critical’, President Volodymyr Zelensky revealed, the media reported.
Bombing raids once again rocked energy facilities in Kiev and urban centres across the country this morning, causing blackouts and disrupting water supplies, just one day after the capital was peppered with a swarm of suicide drones, Daily Mail reported.
The strikes in the early hours of Tuesday hit Kiev, Kharkiv in the east, Mykolaiv in the south and central regions of Dnipro and Zhytomyr, where officials said hospitals were running on backup generators, Daily Mail reported.
Drones bombarded Kiev on Monday, destroying a residential building in the centre and killing five people in what the presidency described as an attack of desperation.
It was the second Monday in a row that Russia launched punitive strikes which military observers have said appear to be Moscow’s response to battlefield losses.
Zelensky described the repeated targeted of energy infrastructure as ‘another kind of Russian terrorist attacks’.
“Since October 10, 30 per cent of Ukraine’s power stations have been destroyed, causing massive blackouts across the country,” the Ukrainian leader said on Twitter.
He said the attack meant that there was ‘no space left for negotiations with (President Vladimir) Putin’s regime’.
Zhytomyr, located 80 miles west of Kiev and with a population of 230,000, was completely without power and water early Monday, according to the city’s mayor, Daily Mail reported.
President Zelensky, speaking overnight, said Russia ‘doesn’t have any chance on the battlefield and is trying to compensate for its military defeats with terror.
“They continue to do what they do best — terrorise and kill civilians,” he added on Telegram. “The terrorist state will not change anything with such actions.”
–IANS