Emergency blackouts across Ukraine after ‘massive’ missile attack

Russia has launched a “massive strike” on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, the country’s energy minister said, as explosions were reported in several cities.

The co-ordinated assault unfolded over several hours with waves of drones and missiles flying across the length and breadth of Ukraine – the second attack of its kind this month.

Energy Minister Herman Halushchenko urged people to take shelter and said emergency power outages had been introduced after confirming attacks on facilities were “taking place all over Ukraine”.

There are reports of damage to civilian infrastructure across Ukraine, although the full picture is not yet clear.

Russian attacks on three western regions has cut power to at least one million people, according to local officials in Lviv, Rivne and Volyn regions.

Elsewhere, the mayor of Kharkiv, Igor Terekhov, said there was shelling of a civilian area in the city, while the mayor of Lutsk, Ihor Polishchuk, said multiple explosions had been heard and electricity was out in part of the city.

Mr Polishchuk said trolleybuses in Lutsk have stopped while the head of the Rivne administration Oleksandr Koval has said electricity supplies have been cut to over 280,000 people in the western region.

Early on Thursday, the Ukrainian air force issued a nationwide air raid warning “due to the threat of missile danger” – those alerts ended later in the morning.

Ukrainian media reported that explosions had been heard in the key port city of Odesa, while regional governor Oleg Kiper urged residents to stay somewhere safe.

Officials in the regions of Sumy and Volyn have also reported strikes.

Ukrainian authorities have responded by implementing pre-emptive emergency power cuts in order to minimise damaging overloads to the country’s grid.

Temperatures are dropping and the country has already experienced its first snowfalls, but the full force of Ukraine’s famously harsh winter has not yet been felt.

Ukrainian officials have been warning for some time that Russia has been stockpiling cruise and ballistic missiles in order to launch co-ordinated and country-wide attacks on Ukraine’s energy system.

If Russia keeps up these country-wide attacks on Ukraine’s energy system, as it has in previous winters, then the country will once again face a challenging few months.

Earlier this month, Ukraine’s largest private energy company, DTEK, said its thermal energy plants suffered “significant damage”, resulting in blackouts.

That attack was the eighth large-scale one targeting Ukraine’s energy facilities this year, DTEK said in a statement.

It added that its plants had been attacked more than 190 times since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Ukrainian officials fear the most recent strike could signal another concerted Russian attempt to deplete the power grid as winter arrives.

Having already endured two-and-a-half bitter winters since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, Ukrainians are bracing themselves for another.

Since Sunday evening, Russia has carried out close to 1,500 strikes on Ukraine following a week of escalation in the war which has also seen Ukraine fire US and British missiles into Russia for the first time.

Last Wednesday Ukraine launched UK-supplied Storm Shadow missiles at targets in Russia’s Kursk region.

In its response, Russia deployed a new type of missile – “Oreshnik” – to strike the Ukrainian city of Dnipro.

Additional reporting by Christy Cooney