Russian missile barrage targets Kyiv and other cities
By Marc Santora and Matt Stevens
KYIV — Eighty per cent of the Ukrainian capital was without water Monday (Oct 31), at least temporarily, after Russia launched dozens of cruise missiles at critical infrastructure and other targets across the country Monday morning, in Moscow’s latest barrage aimed at civilian targets.
Residents of Kyiv, the capital city of more than 2 million people, were directed to wells and emergency water distribution sites, and many lined up with plastic jugs to carry water home as utility crews raced to make repairs. Power was also knocked out in parts of Kyiv and other cities, officials said.
Ukraine’s air force said it had shot down 44 out of the more than 50 missiles fired from the Caspian Sea and the Rostov region of western Russia. The claim could not be immediately verified. Strikes hit 10 regions across Ukraine, damaging 18 “objects of civilian critical infrastructure,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement. Thirteen civilians were injured, the Ukrinform news agency reported.
Moscow in recent weeks has repeatedly launched strikes aimed at crippling Ukraine’s energy grid. On Monday, an official at Ukraine’s national energy utility, Ukrenergo, said power stations appeared again to be a primary target.
Russia’s Ministry of Defence said in a statement that it had taken aim at “the military control and energy systems of Ukraine.”
By early afternoon, fires were still smouldering at an electrical substation north of Kyiv, although residents there said they appeared to be caused by falling debris from a rocket blasted out of the sky.
Vitali Klitschko, the mayor of Kyiv, said Monday morning that engineers were working to restore the electricity supply after an energy facility that provides power to about 350,000 apartments in Kyiv was damaged. Traffic lights across the capital were out Monday morning and cellular service was spotty.
Local officials in the cities of Zaporizhzhia in the south and Kharkiv in the northeast, and the Cherkasy region in central Ukraine, all reported that Russian strikes had hit critical infrastructure.
It was the third Monday this month that Ukrainians awoke to an aerial assault across many parts of the nation. On Oct. 10, Russian missile and drone attacks destroyed 30% of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. A week later, a series of drone strikes hit in the heart of the capital and other cities around the country.
While Ukraine said it had shot down the vast majority of Russian missiles Monday, the strikes still managed to inflict damage on the battered electricity grid — another sign that, amid setbacks on the front lines, Russia would continue to try to inflict pain on civilians as temperatures drop.
“Russian strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure are terrorism and an attempt to freeze millions of civilians,” Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s Interior Ministry, tweeted. “They want to leave people with no light, water and sewage — in winter, in the cold.”
“Instead of fighting on the battlefield, Russia fights civilians,” Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, said on Twitter. “Don’t justify these attacks by calling them a ‘response’. Russia does this because it still has the missiles and the will to kill Ukrainians.”
-New York Times
Comments are closed, but trackbacks and pingbacks are open.