KYIV, Ukraine — Explosions rang out before dawn Monday in Kiev and other Ukrainian cities as officials said Russia had launched another drone strike targeting factories electricity and other critical infrastructure.
The Ukrainian Air Force said it shot down 20 of the 35 drones Russia launched, although those that evaded air defenses hit power plants, power systems and targets. other civil.
At least four loud explosions were heard in the capital Kiev, where people rushed to take shelter. While most of the drones that entered the city’s airspace were shot down by the Ukrainian air defenses, officials said, those that passed crashed into a power plant, causing further loss of life. electricity in Kiev. Power outages due to Russian strikes.
“There is damage,” Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko said in a statement. “Energy and heating engineers are working to quickly stabilize the situation with energy and heat supplies.”
By afternoon, Klitschko said temperatures had recovered for all but 3% of the two million people still living in the city.
As an aerial battle between Russian drones and Ukrainian warplanes and anti-aircraft missiles was heard in the skies over the capital overnight, officials in two other regions in the central and southern regions Southern Ukraine, Dnipropetrovsk and Mykolaiv, also reported drones overhead late Sunday and early Monday.
President Volodymyr Zelensky said the drones used in Monday’s attacks were from a new batch of Iranian-made Shahed aircraft received by Russia. He cited those details in a speech to European leaders gathered in Latvia, in which he call for more support for the Ukrainian air defense. Although Iran has officially denied supplying weapons to Russia since its invasion of Ukraine, US officials have said that the first shipment was August delivery.
By about 5 a.m., authorities had lifted the air strike warning for all provinces in Ukraine except Kiev and the surrounding area.
Russia has been conducting missile and drone strikes on Ukraine’s power plants, substations and transmission lines since October, in what military analysts say is an attempt force aimed plunge the country into darkness and cold when winter begins. In the past week, the attacks seems to be happening in the dark when Russian forces tried to evade Ukraine’s defenses.
The latest attack began late on Sunday, just before midnight. Vitaliy Kim, governor of the Mykolaiv region, posted on Telegram that Iran-made Shahed unmanned aerial vehicle used by Russia is flying towards the area. “We have motorbikes,” Kim wrote, using the nickname Ukrainians have used for the small, humming engine that powers the drones.
However, by morning, there were no reports that the drones had hit targets in the Mykolaiv region of southern Ukraine.
Oleksiy Kuleba, the military governor of the Kyiv region, the administrative district surrounding the capital, said the drones had hit “infrastructures and private homes”. According to regional police, three people were injured during the strikes.
South of Kyiv, along the banks of the Dnipro River, many drones flew into towns and cities in the Dnipropetrovsk region, where the military administrator, Valentyn Reznichenko, said that the air defenses shot down two the Shahed. Mr. Reznichenko said a missile attack in the area knocked out power to water pumps, leaving some villages without running water.
Ukraine’s national nuclear energy company, Energoatom, said one of the Iranian drones flew over the Southern Ukraine Nuclear Power Plant, located about 70 miles north of the city of Mykolaiv, shortly after half an hour. night. In a statement, the company called it a “completely unacceptable violation of nuclear and radiation safety”.
Maria Varennikova contribution report.
