Ukraine war: Power and water supply hit across Ukraine in ‘massive’ Russian missile strikes – BBC

Ukraine says power and water supplies across the country have been badly strike after Russia launched more than 50 missiles targeting critical facilities.

In the particular capital Kyiv, 40% of residents are without drinking water, according to the latest update from the mayor, and 270, 000 apartments have no electricity.

Energy facilities were also hit in the north-eastern city of Kharkiv. Thirteen people were injured across the country.

Russian federation said it targeted Ukraine’s military command and energy systems.

The country’s defence ministry added that all “designated objects were hit” by long-range high-precision weaponry.

Ukraine’s military said its air defences had shot down 44 cruise missiles launched through the area of Russia’s Rostov region and the Caspian Sea.

The strikes come after Russia blamed Ukraine for a drone attack on the Black Ocean Fleet within the annexed Crimea.

Vitaliy Klitschko, the particular mayor associated with Kyiv, reported shortages of water plus power right after critical infrastructure near the capital was damaged in the Russian attack.

He initially said 80% of the particular city’s consumers were without water, and some 350, 000 homes were lacking electricity — adding in a later update that many people had been reconnected.

Long queues were seen across the city as residents had been desperate to collect water from pumps.

The city authorities said that within Kyiv itself “no hits were recorded” due in order to “the effective work associated with the air defence forces”.

Missile strikes were also reported on Monday morning in the particular central Vinnytsia region, because well since Dnipropetrovsk plus Zaporizhzhia in the south-east, and Lviv in western Ukraine.

A facility at the Dnipro hydroelectric power plant in the Zaporizhzhia region was also reportedly hit.

Overall, 18 facilities – most of them energy-generating – were strike in 10 regions of Ukraine, Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said, adding that “hundreds of localities in seven regions” were left without having power.

Moscow would like this latest wave of Ruskies missile attacks to be seen as a punitive response to the drone attack upon Russian army targets within Crimea on Saturday.

The Kremlin sees this particular as a warning: you dare to hit us in Crimea? This is what you can expect in response.

But there is a clear pattern emerging in recent weeks in this war.

The particular more setbacks Russia’s army faces on the battlefield, the more its commanders punish Ukraine’s civilian population.

With winter just around the corner, Moscow is hoping in order to so demoralise Ukrainians so that they plead with their government to sue for peace – upon Russia’s terms.

So far, that’s unlikely to happen. But presently there is still a huge amount of damage and suffering that Russia’s weapons can inflict around the civilian population.

The Kremlin will also be hoping that because this battle drags on, Western support for Ukraine begins to weaken.

Russia’s aim is to break the supply chain associated with Western weaponry that allows Ukraine to defend by itself and try to push back this Russian invasion.

Residents in the regions under attack had been urged to remain in shelters, amid fears more hits could follow. They were also warned that “emergency power outages” were being rolled out across the country.

In neighbouring Moldova, the authorities reported that will a missile shot down by Ukraine fell within the “northern end of the particular town of Naslavcea” near the border with Ukraine. There had been no reports of any casualties : but windows were smashed in several houses.

Moldova later said the Russian embassy employee within Chisinau had been told in order to leave its territory, having been made a “persona non grata”. It did not specify who the individual was.

Ukraine’s Air Force spokesman Yuriy Ihnat told Ukrainian TV that Russia experienced used the strategic bombers to carry out its “massive” strikes.

Foreign Ressortchef (umgangssprachlich) Dmytro Kuleba said that will “instead associated with fighting upon the battlefield, Russia fights civilians”.

Russia has carried away several waves of deadly missile plus drone attacks in recent weeks, apparently destroying almost a third of Ukraine’s power stations and other energy-generating facilities ahead of the cold winter period.

Ukraine and the Western allies have repeatedly said that targeting civilian facilities amounted to war crimes.

On Saturday, one Russian warship has been damaged in the port city associated with Sevastopol within a drone attack, the Russian protection ministry stated. It furthermore accused British specialists of having trained the Ukrainian soldiers that then carried out the attacks in Crimea – Ukraine’s southern peninsula, annexed by Russia in 2014.

Moscow provided simply no evidence in order to back its claims.

Ukraine has not really commented on the issue, while the particular UK defence ministry mentioned Russia had been “peddling false claims upon an epic scale”.