A fresh barrage of cruise missile attacks hit Ukraine’s critical infrastructure on Saturday, causing mass power outages across the nation.
Hundreds of thousands of people in central and western Ukraine woke up this weekend to the sound of artillery and power outages, as air defence shot down incoming Russian drones.
Ukraine's air force command reported that 33 missiles pounded the country on Saturday morning and that 18 of those had been shot down by air defence systems. It said it was a "massive missile attack” targeting “critical infrastructure."
Presidential advisor Kyrylo Tymoshenko said that as of Saturday afternoon, more than a million people across the country were without power, with 672,000 of those in the western region of Khmelnytskyi alone.
The city council in Khmelnytskyi urged residents to store water "in case it's also gone within an hour".
In the city of Lutsk in western Ukraine, a missile hit a power plant, causing a blackout in part of the city, the mayor, Ihor Polishchuk, said on Telegram. The blast wave damaged a private home and injured at least one person, he said.
Ukrenergo, Ukraine's state grid operator, warned that the “scale of damage is comparable or may exceed the consequences of the attack on October 10 - 12”, which left 30 per cent of the country without power.
It said it would begin to limit the supply of electricity to homes in the capital and four regions of the country due to the recent attacks, to lower the pressure on the grid and give workers time to repair the damage.
With winter fast approaching, Russian forces have been targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in a bid to leave millions cold and in the dark in a country that can plunge to colds of -20.
The United Nations has said that under international humanitarian law, attacks on civilian infrastructure are prohibited.
"Combined with soaring gas and coal prices, they expose millions of civilians to extreme hardship and even life-endangering conditions this winter", it continued.
Mykhailo Podolyak, a political adviser to the Ukrainian president, has accused Moscow of trying to “provoke new refugees” to flee to Europe by targeting the energy supplies.
While foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba said the attacks constituted genocide.
"Deliberate strikes on Ukraine's critical civilian infrastructure are part of Russia's genocide of Ukrainians," Kuleba wrote on Twitter.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said late Friday that the recent attacks had a clear goal: “to make the Ukrainian people suffer.”
