Firefighters push out a fire in an industrial area of the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, after a massive overnight missile attack on Ukraine on September 21, 2023.
Russian missiles hit Ukrainian energy installations on Thursday, September 21, in what seemed to be the first strike of a new air campaign targeting the country's electrical infrastructure, authorities said.
Reports of power outages have come in from five different locations throughout western, central, and eastern Ukraine, bringing back painful memories of the many air attacks on crucial infrastructure that left millions of Ukrainians in the dark and freezing last winter.
Ukrenergo, a grid operator, confirmed damage to facilities, calling the strike the first Russian attack on electricity infrastructure in six months.
Largest Attack in Weeks
According to Reuters, Russian drones were shot down above the occupied Crimean peninsula and the Black Sea overnight. Moscow claims that Kyiv has been bombing Russian territory as it launches a counteroffensive.
According to Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, the head of the Ukrainian armed forces, 36 of Russia's 43 cruise missiles were intercepted by Ukrainian air defenses overnight. Reuters sources report hearing loud explosions in and around Kyiv as day broke.
Seven people were hurt in the capital, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said, including a 9-year-old girl. He said a fire started when missile fragments landed in the downtown area, damaging an infrastructure complex and many commercial buildings.
Additionally, Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said that a hotel and many commercial kiosks were destroyed in central Ukraine's Cherkasy. An injured guy was evacuated from the building on a stretcher as firefighters extinguished the blaze.
Authorities in Cherkasy, Kharkiv, Khmelnytskiy, Rivne, Vinnytsia, Lviv, and Ivano-Frankivsk all reported explosions. Partial blackouts occurred in the Rivne, Zhytomyr, Kyiv, Dnipropetrovsk, and Kharkiv districts.
Three Russian missiles reportedly targeted the western city of Drohobych, according to Lviv's regional governor Maksym Kozytskyi. He said that a warehouse and a facility were attacked.
Oleksandr Prokudin, the governor of southern Ukraine's city of Kherson, added that Russian shelling on a dormitory there had killed two people.
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Ukraine's Defenses
Even with upgraded Western-supplied air defenses this year, Ukraine still has a formidable task in protecting such a large territory.
Russia, which sent thousands of soldiers to Ukraine in February 2022, has been conducting air attacks on the country's ports and grain infrastructure since mid-July. This makes it more difficult for Kyiv, a key global grain exporter, to ship out its goods.
While Moscow claims no civilians were intended targets, several assaults have resulted in their deaths.
Russia has said nothing about the latest round of airstrikes, which have been going on while Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is in the United States for negotiations after attending the United Nations General Assembly to drum up support for his country.
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