Nearly a third of Ukraine’s power stations have been destroyed by Russian drone and missile attacks in the past eight days, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has said, as his office warned of a “critical” power situation nationwide. Zelenskiy accused Russia of engaging in “terrorist attacks” affecting a significant proportion of the country’s critical infrastructure and wreaking havoc on electricity and other utility supplies.
Kyrylo Tymoshenko, the deputy head of the presidential office, said energy infrastructure and power supply were targeted overnight in an eastern district of Kyiv, where two people were killed, and in the cities of Dnipro and Zhytomyr.
Two “objects of critical infrastructure” were damaged in Kyiv, said the city’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, and electricity and water supply in “many houses” in west Kyiv was “partially limited”. The mayor appealed to residents to conserve electricity, and said houses experiencing reduced water pressure should use water as “economically as possible”.
All of Zhytomyr was without electricity and water after a double missile strike on an energy facility, said the mayor, Serhiy Sukhomlyn. Hospitals were running on backup power, he said.
Klitschko said a fifth person, an elderly woman, had been found dead after a wave of drone attacks in the centre of Kyiv on Monday morning. She died after a residential building was hit.
Russia has been targeting Ukraine with a mixture of missiles and, more recently, Iranian-made Shahed-136 drones, rebranded as Geran-2 by the attackers. Iran denies supplying the drones to Russia, while the Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said he did not have any information about their origin. “Russian equipment with Russian names is being used,” Peskov said.
The German ambassador to the UK, Miguel Berger, has called for sanctions against Iran over the allegations the country has supplied weaponry to Russia, a claim Tehran denies.
Ukraine’s foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba has announced he is submitting a proposal to the president’s office to cut diplomatic ties with Iran.
The US warned on Monday it would take action against companies and nations working with Iran’s drone programme after claiming Russia used the imports for deadly kamikaze strikes in Kyiv
Oleh Synyehubov, governor of Kharkiv, said “Tuesday at around 8.30 am, the enemy launched eight rockets at Kharkiv from the Russian city of Belgorod” but there were no casualties.
Vyacheslav Gladkov, the governor of Russia’s Belgorod region, has said a man has been injured after Ukrainian forces shelled a railway station within Russia.
UK defence secretary Ben Wallace has hastily cancelled an early afternoon appearance before the Commons defence committee for an urgent trip to Washington DC, prompting speculation as to the purpose of the sudden visit. James Heappey, a deputy defence minister, said “my boss Ben Wallace is in Washington this morning” in an interview in Sky News and offered a cryptic explanation of his presence there. The junior minister told Sky News that Wallace was going “to have the sort of conversations that … beyond belief really the fact we are at a time when these sort of conversations are necessary”.
A preliminary investigation of damages on the two Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Danish part of the Baltic Sea show that the leaks were caused by “powerful explosions”, Copenhagen police said in a statement.
Germany’s interior minister, Nancy Faeser, has sacked the country’s cybersecurity chief, following allegations he had turned a blind eye to a firm with with links to Russian security circles. Arne Schönbohm, the president of the German Federal Office for Information Security, was released from his duties with immediate effect.
Russia’s Duma has indefinitely stopped broadcasting live plenary sessions to protect information from “our enemy”, a leading lawmaker said on Tuesday as parliament’s lower house debated topics related to the war in Ukraine.
A Russian military jet crashed Monday into a residential building in Yeysk shortly after taking off near the border with Ukraine, sparking a major fire that has left at least 13 people dead, including three children. Russian news agency RIA reports that investigators believe a “technical malfunction of the aircraft” to be the main factor in the crash. The pilots ejected before the crash.
Moscow stepped up attacks across Ukraine on Monday, killing four people and cutting off power in a series of kamikaze drone strikes in the capital. Ukraine’s prime minister, Denys Shmygal, said Russia launched five strikes in Kyiv, as well as attacks against energy facilities in Sumy and the central Dnipropetrovsk regions, knocking out electricity to hundreds of towns and villages.
Ukraine announced that more than 100 prisoners have been swapped with Russia in what it said was the first all-female exchange with Moscow after nearly eight months of war. “The more Russian prisoners we have, the sooner we will be able to free our heroes. Every Ukrainian soldier, every frontline commander should remember this,” Zelensky said.
The European Union has agreed Monday to create a mission to train 15,000 Ukrainian soldiers. It will also provide a further €500m to help buy weapons. An EU foreign ministers meeting on Monday approved the two-year training mission, which will involve different EU forces providing basic and specialist instruction to Ukrainian soldiers, in Poland and Germany. Officials hope the mission, which is expected to cost €107m, will be up and running by mid November.
Israeli officials refused to comment on comments from Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s former president, that Tel Aviv is preparing to supply military aid to Ukraine. In a Telegram message on Monday, Medvedev, currently deputy chair of Russia’s security council, warned Israel against arming Kyiv, calling it a “a reckless move” that would “destroy relations between our countries”. Israel has tried to maintain a neutral stance, as it relies on Russia to facilitate its operations against Iranian-linked actors in Syria.
Marina Ovsyannikova, the former Russian state TV journalist who staged an on-air protest against the war in March, has fled the country, according to her lawyer.
