Russia has continued its assault on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure as Vladimir Putin threatens to strike “decision-making centres” in Kyiv with Moscow’s new ballistic Oreshnik missile.
More than 200 missiles and drones were fired by Russia on Thursday morning, leaving more than a million households without power, according to reports from Ukrainian officials.
Moscow has frequently targeted Ukraine’s power grid and the country is expected to struggle to cope with demand during the winter, particularly if the attacks continue. About half of Ukraine’s energy capacity has been destroyed over the past three years and, in recent weeks, Ukrainian officials have suggested Russia may be stockpiling missiles in order to launch coordinated strikes on the power infrastructure and make winter miserable for millions.
The latest attack came as cold, wintry weather set in across the country, with a dusting of snow across Kyiv in recent days. “Once again, the energy sector is under massive enemy attack. Attacks on energy facilities are taking place across Ukraine,” the energy minister, Herman Halushchenko, said in a Facebook post.
He said the national power grid had “urgently introduced emergency power cuts” and outages were reported in regions across Ukraine. These emergency outages are in addition to rolling scheduled power cuts in much of the country. Western Ukraine was worst affected on Thursday morning, with the head of Lviv region saying around half a million households there were without power.
Ukraine’s air force said in a statement that Russia had launched dozens of missiles from land, sea and air against Ukraine, focusing on energy infrastructure. The president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, claimed Thursday’s attack had included Kalibr cruise missiles with cluster munitions, calling it an “insidious escalation”.
Explosions were audible in the capital and various other cities across the country. In Kyiv, an air raid alert was in place for most of the night, and missile debris fell in one neighbourhood, but there were no reports of casualties in the city.
“Each such attack proves that air defence systems are needed now in Ukraine, where they save lives, and not at storage bases,” Zelenskyy said in a message posted to Telegram.
Meanwhile, Putin warned that Russia was selecting targets to strike in Ukraine with the experimental Oreshnik missile in response to Ukrainian long-range strikes on Russian territory with western weapons.
“At present, the Ministry of Defence and the general staff are selecting targets to hit on Ukrainian territory. These could be military facilities, defence and industrial enterprises or decision-making centres in Kyiv,” Putin told a meeting of a security alliance of ex-Soviet countries in Kazakhstan.
Russia’s first ever use of the Oreshnik intermediate-range ballistic missile on Dnipro last week captured global attention.
The Russian leader announced Moscow’s plans to further increase the production of Oreshnik missiles, which he claims are impossible to intercept.
The strikes in Ukraine came a day after the US president-elect, Donald Trump, named the retired army general Keith Kellogg as his envoy for Russia and Ukraine. Trump has promised to bring a negotiated end to the war and officials in Kyiv have been watching anxiously to see what appointments he makes.
There will be reassurance over the appointment of the 80-year-old Kellogg, who has not espoused some of the pro-Russian rhetoric common to some in Trump’s orbit, and has previously talked about a plan to leverage military aid by increasing it while pushing for peace talks.
During regular appearances on US television, Kellogg has criticised Russia’s invasion and warned of the conflict spiralling into a global conflagration. He has also made it clear that Ukraine will have little choice but to negotiate, even if it is not clear what security guarantees Kyiv could obtain that Russia would be held to any ceasefire deal.
“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 [to] 250,000,” Kellogg told Voice of America at the Republican party convention in July.
There is a growing awareness in Kyiv that exhaustion after nearly three years of full-scale war combined with the arrival of the Trump administration means there will be pressure to begin some kind of talks with the Russians. But there is no sign that Russia is ready to negotiate yet or that it would be willing to discuss ceasefire terms that are not humiliating for Ukraine.
“Even people who say they are ready for negotiations understand that they are only possible if we force Russia to the table. Negotiations through strength, not through capitulation,” said Zelenskyy’s adviser, Mykhailo Podolyak, in an interview in Kyiv.
