President Vladimir Putin has said 100 drones and 90 missiles were launched at Ukraine over the past two days “in response to strikes deep” inside Russia as he threatened to hit Kyiv with a new missile.
Putin was addressing a meeting of a security alliance of former Soviet countries in Kazakhstan’s capital, Astana, on Thursday after Ukraine said Russian missiles targeted its power infrastructure.
He also addressed Russia’s use of the Oreshnik intermediate-range ballistic missile last week on the Ukrainian city of Dnipro.
Putin told the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) summit that Russia has begun serial production of the nuclear-capable weapon, and the Ministry of Defence was currently selecting more targets in Ukraine for strikes with the new missile.
Those targets could include “decision-making centres” in Kyiv in response to Ukrainian long-range strikes on Russian territory with Western weapons, he added.
In the event of a massive use of the Oreshnik, the force of the strike “will be comparable to nuclear weapons”, he threatened.
Ukraine’s Energy Minister German Galushchenko said on Thursday that the country’s power infrastructure came “under massive enemy attack” prompting the national power grid’s operator to introduce emergency power cuts amid freezing temperatures.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called the attack a “despicable escalation”, accusing Russia of using cluster munitions.
“In several regions, strikes with cluster munitions were recorded, and they targeted civilian infrastructure,” he said in a post on Telegram. “This is a very despicable escalation of Russian terrorist tactics.”
He said Ukraine needed more Western air defence systems “now” to protect against the Russian strikes.
“This is especially important in winter when we have to protect our infrastructure from targeted Russian attacks,” Zelenskyy added.
Cluster munitions have killed or wounded more than 1,000 people in Ukraine since Russia launched its all-out war in February 2022, the Cluster Munition Coalition (CMC) said in its annual report in September.
They also pose a long-term risk since many fail to explode on impact, effectively acting as landmines that can explode years later, the CMC noted.
Russia and Ukraine are not among the 112 states that are party to the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions, which bans the use, transfer, production and storage of cluster bombs.
Reporting from Kharkiv, Al Jazeera’s Assed Baig said the attack seems to be Russia’s “largest in recent months”.
“The Ukrainian air defences have been in action to intercept some of those missiles, but there are reports of residential buildings being hit in Kharkiv as well as debris falling in areas of the capital, Kyiv,” he said.
Ukraine’s air force said Russia fired 91 missiles and 97 attack drones, adding that 79 of the missiles and 35 of the drones were intercepted.
At least some of the weapons hit their targets, Ukrainian officials said.
“Power facilities in several regions were damaged,” the Ukrenergo national power grid electricity operator said, adding that it had introduced emergency blackouts across the country.
Authorities in the Lviv and Kyiv regions said critical infrastructure sites had been hit.
There have been power outages in Kyiv, Odesa, Dnipro and Donetsk regions, according to Ukrenergo, as temperatures across the country dropped to about 0 degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit).
The CEO of the Yasno energy supplier, Serhii Kovalenko, subsequently said there were emergency blackouts all over the country because of the attacks.
More than a million customers in Ukraine’s west, hundreds of kilometres from the front lines, were without power.
“As of now, 523,000 subscribers in Lviv region are without electricity,” chief of the western region, Maksym Kozytskyi, said on social media.
Regional officials said at least 280,000 others were cut off in the western Rivne region and another 215,000 in the northwestern Volyn region, which also borders Poland, a European Union and NATO member.
“Power engineers are working to ensure backup power supply schemes where possible. They have already started restoration work where the security situation allows,” the Ministry of Energy said.
Breach of international law
The ministry said it was the 11th massive Russian attack on Ukraine’s civilian energy infrastructure this year.
Catriona Murdoch, director of the starvation and humanitarian crisis division of Global Rights Compliance, an international human rights foundation, said Russia was breaching international law with attacks on the energy system.
“Russia’s systematic attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure are not just acts of war – they are crimes that deliberately target and terrify the civilian population, leaving millions vulnerable,” she said in a statement sent to Al Jazeera.
“[The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants] in relation to such attacks on energy during the winter of 2022, perpetrators must be held accountable for this second wave of attacks which are a violation of international law,” Murdoch added.
