Russian forces appeared to target Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, including electrical stations and power lines, as a flurry of missile strikes rained down on cities across the country on Monday morning, a move that Ukrainian officials said was aimed crippling the nation’s energy system as winter nears.
A senior official in President Volodymyr Zelensky’s office, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, said it was “unequivocally clear” that Russian strikes had targeted energy facilities in 12 regions across the country.
“This can affect the stability of the energy supply,” he warned in a Telegram statement.
There were significant internet disruptions because of the outages across Ukraine, with usage in some regions falling to about 25 percent of normal use, Netblocks, an internet monitoring agency said.
“The morning is hard,” Mr. Zelensky said in a video address on Monday morning, adding that Russian strikes had hit energy facilities in 12 regions across the country.
“They want panic and chaos, they want to destroy our energy system. They are hopeless,” he said.
The strikes continue a pattern of long-range attacks on infrastructure that began last month as Russian forces sustained heavy losses on the battlefield.
Amid the strikes, one explosion in the western city of Lviv hit a “critical infrastructure facility,” causing electricity and hot water outages in the city, according to its mayor, Andriy Sadovyi.
“A third of the traffic lights do not work,” he said in a Telegram post. “Take care of yourself and your family!”
Lviv, Khmelnytsky, Zhytomyr and Kharkiv were all hit by strikes on Monday morning, leaving them without electricity and central heating. In Lviv, electrical outages forced the shutdown of central heating stations. In Kharkiv the municipal waterworks shut down. Local officials in Kharkiv and Zhytomyr said electrical infrastructure had been hit.
Source : Nytimes
