Ukraine’s power infrastructure was “under massive enemy attack” on Thursday, the country’s energy minister said, after a nationwide air raid alert was declared due to incoming missiles.
“Once again, the energy sector is under massive enemy attack. Attacks on energy facilities are taking place across Ukraine,” German Galushchenko said in a Facebook post.
National power grid operator Ukrenergo had “urgently introduced emergency power cuts”, he added, as temperatures across the country dropped to freezing.
Energy provider DTEK said Ukrenergo was introducing emergency power outages in the regions of Kyiv, Odesa, Dnipro and Donetsk.
Ukraine’s military said earlier Thursday that an air raid alert had been declared across the country “due to a missile threat” in a message on Telegram. Missiles were detected headed for Kharkiv, Odesa and eight other regions, according to other messages from the air force. “Kharkiv, go to the shelters!” it warned.
Oleg Synegubov, head of the Kharkiv region military administration, said on Telegram that three strikes had hit Kharkiv’s Kyivskyi district, with no casualties reported so far.
The mayor of Lutsk in northwestern Ukraine, Igor Polishchuk, said that “explosions were heard again” in the city.
A senior UN official, Rosemary DiCarlo, this month denounced the rise in civilian casualties in the nearly three-year conflict between Ukraine and Russia, noting Moscow’s targeting of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure may make this winter the “harshest since the start of the war”.
The latest missile salvo comes a day after US president-elect Donald Trump named staunch loyalist and retired general Keith Kellogg as his Ukraine envoy, charged with ending the Russian invasion.
A fixture on the cable news circuit, 80-year-old national security veteran Kellogg co-wrote a paper this year calling for Washington to leverage military aid as a means of pushing for peace talks.
Kellogg told Voice of America at the Republican convention in July that Ukraine’s options were “quite clear”. “If Ukraine doesn’t want to negotiate, fine, but then accept the fact that you can have enormous losses in your cities and accept the fact that you will have your children killed, accept the fact that you don’t have 130,000 dead, you will have 230,000-250,000,” he said.
