Dozens of Russian missiles were reportedly launched against Ukraine on Wednesday morning, with explosions heard in Mykolaiv and Dnipropetrovsk regions. Air raid alerts were heard across all over the country as Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to Ukraine’s interior ministry, urged people to stay in shelters. Russian forces launched 70 missiles at Ukraine in its latest “large-scale attack on crucial infrastructure facilities,” Ukraine’s armed forces said.
At least seven people have been killed – including a 17-year-old girl – and 36 injured after a Russian missile strike in Kyiv, according officials. Oleksii Kuleba, head of the regional military administration, said the entire Kyiv region was without electricity after Moscow’s airstrikes targeted critical infrastructure.
The mayor of Lviv, Andriy Sadovyi, has said the entire western Ukrainian city is “without light” following Russian strikes. Sadovyi warned that there would be “interruptions” with the city’s water supply and that he was awaiting additional information from energy experts.
Ukraine’s state-run nuclear energy firm, Energoatom, has said power units of three Ukrainian nuclear power plants were switched off after Russian missile strikes across the country. In a statement, it said “due to a decrease in frequency in the energy system of Ukraine” emergency protection was activated at the Rivne, Pivdennoukrainsk and Khmelnytskyi nuclear power plants.
Russian missile strikes on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure caused blackouts across half of neighbouring Moldova, the deputy prime minister of Moldova said. Moldelectrica, the state-owned energy firm, is working to reconnect more than 50% of the country to electricity, Andrei Spînu, said. Moldova’s foreign affairs minister, Nicu Popescu, said he has asked for Russia’s ambassador to be summoned.
The UN’s security council will hold an urgent meeting on Wednesday on Russia’s latest strikes at the request of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Zelenskiy said Ukrainians are “unbreakable” and that the country will rebuild damaged infrastructure and “get through all of this”.
A newborn baby was killed after an overnight Russian rocket attack struck a hospital maternity ward in southern Ukraine. Ukraine’s state emergency service said that a woman with her two-day-old baby and a doctor had been in the facility in the town of Vilniansk, close to the city of Zaporizhzhia, that was destroyed.
The mayor of Kyiv, Vitali Klitschko, said warned the Ukrainian capital faces “the worst winter since World War II” after Russian attacks on the city’s energy infrastructure. Residents in Kyiv had to be ready for the “worst case scenario” of widespread power cuts at low temperatures in which parts of the capital would have to be evacuated, he said in an interview with the German newspaper Bild.
A Ukrainian security official has said suspected Russian citizens, cash and documents were seized in a raid on a 1,000-year-old Orthodox Christian monastery in Kyiv and other Orthodox sites. The raid, which took place on Tuesday, was part of operations to counter suspected “subversive activities by Russian special services”, Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of the National Security and Defence Council, said.
The Russian foreign ministry criticised Ukraine as “godless”, “wild” and “immoral” on Wednesday for raiding the the 1,000-year-old Kyiv Pechersk Lavra complex – or Kyiv Monastery of the Caves – early on Tuesday.
The European parliament came under “sophisticated cyberattacks” officials said, hours after it voted to declare Russia a state sponsor of terrorism. The president of the European parliament, Roberta Metsola, said a pro-Kremlin group has claimed responsibility for the denial of service attack on the European parliament’s website.
The European parliament has declared Russia “a terrorist regime” over its brutal war on Ukraine. In a non-binding resolution approved by a large majority of MEPs, the European parliament urged the EU’s 27 member states to make the same designation “with all the negative consequences this implies”. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, welcomed the declaration.
The US has announced a new $400m (£332.5m) aid package to Ukraine which will include weapons, munitions and air defence equipment. The package also includes more than 200 generators to help Ukraine deal with power outages caused by Russian attacks on energy infrastructure.
The head of the UN nuclear watchdog met a Russian delegation in Istanbul on Wednesday to discuss safety at the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine, the watchdog said. The Zaporizhzhia plant, which Russia seized shortly after its invasion, was again rocked by shelling at the weekend, leading to renewed calls from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to create a protection zone around it to prevent a nuclear disaster, Reuters reported.
The UK is sending helicopters to Ukraine for the first time, the defence secretary, Ben Wallace, has announced. Three Sea King helicopters will be provided, with the first already in Ukraine, according to PA Media. Wallace also said an extra 10,000 artillery rounds were being sent to help Ukraine secure the territory it has recaptured from the invading forces in recent weeks.
Germany has angrily dismissed claims by Boris Johnson that in the run-up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine it said it would be better for Ukraine to fold than to become embroiled in a long war. Johnson, interviewed by CNN, also claimed that the French president, Emmanuel Macron, was in denial about the threat of invasion, and that Italy, led at the time by Mario Draghi, said it could not help because it was so dependent on Russian hydrocarbons.
Russia has probably launched a number of Iranian manufactured uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) against Ukraine since September, Britain’s Ministry of Defence said. It’s also likely that Russia has nearly exhausted its current stock of Iran-made weapons and will seek resupply, the ministry said in its daily intelligence update posted on Twitter.
The Group of Seven nations are set to soon announce the price cap on Russian oil exports and the coalition will probably adjust the level a few times a year rather than monthly, a senior US Treasury official said on Tuesday. The G7, including the United States, along with the EU and Australia are slated to implement the price cap on sea-borne exports of Russian oil on 5 December, as part of sanctions intended to punish Moscow for its invasion of Ukraine.
Ukrainians needing basic services if Russia knocks out power stations and other facilities this winter can turn to special “invincibility centres,” president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Tuesday. Thousands of centres spread across the country will offer electricity, heat, water, internet service, mobile phone connections and a pharmacy, free of charge and around the clock. “If massive Russian strikes happen again and it’s clear power will not be restored for hours, the ‘invincibility centres’ will go into action with all key services,” Zelenskiy said.
Ukrainians are likely to live with blackouts at least until the end of March, the head of a major energy provider said, as the government started free evacuations for people in Kherson to other regions.
Kyiv will summon the Hungarian ambassador to protest that prime minister Viktor Orbán went to a football match wearing a scarf depicting some Ukrainian territory as part of Hungary, the Ukrainian foreign ministry said on Tuesday. Ukrainian media showed images of Orbán meeting a Hungarian footballer wearing a scarf which the outlet Ukrainska Pravda said depicted a map of “Greater Hungary” including territory that is now part of the neighbouring states of Austria, Slovakia, Romania, Croatia, Serbia and Ukraine.
Russia’s Gazprom has threatened to cut its gas flows to Europe via Ukraine as early as next week. In a statement, the Russian state-owned energy giant said some gas flows being kept in Ukraine were actually meant for Moldova, and accused Kyiv of obstructing the delivery of 52.52m cubic metres from transiting to Moldova.
In Crimea, Russian air defences were activated and two drone attacks were repelled on Tuesday, including one targeting a power station near Sevastopol, the regional governor said. Sevastopol is the home port of Russia’s Black Sea fleet. Russian-installed Governor Mikhail Razvozhaev called for calm and said no damage had been caused.
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The Polish president spoke to a hoax caller pretending to be France’s Emmanuel Macron on the night that a missile hit a village near the Ukrainian border, his office has admitted. “Emmanuel, believe me, I am extra careful,” Duda tells the caller in a recording of the call posted on the internet. “I don’t want to have war with Russia and believe me, I am extra careful, extra careful.”
