A huge missile and drone attack launched by Russia across Ukrainian territory has left at least five people dead, officials have said.
Power cuts and water outages were reported in numerous parts of the country including in some districts of Kyiv, as a result of the strikes, which mainly targeted civilian energy infrastructure.
In a video address on Telegram, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, described the attack early on Monday as “one of the biggest combined strikes” on Ukraine over the course of the war. “More than a hundred missiles of various types and about a hundred Shahed drones,” he said. “And like most previous Russian strikes, this one is just as base, targeting critical civilian infrastructure.”
In central Kyiv, air defences were audible during morning rush hour, and many people took shelter in underground metro stations. In the western city of Lutsk, a block of flats was damaged and there were reports of deaths in five different regions.
The prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, said 15 regions had sustained damage during the strikes, and Zelenskiy said the energy sector had suffered “a lot of damage”. Russia’s Interfax agency cited the country’s defence ministry as saying its forces had targeted energy infrastructure. Russia has been targeting this infrastructure for months, leading to blackouts, rationing and a fear of power shortages over the coming winter.
The attack came two days after Ukraine celebrated its Independence Day. The US embassy in the country had warned of an elevated risk of a Russian attack around the date.
Zelenskiy responded to the attack with a familiar call to western allies to provide more by way of air defence support for Kyiv, and to lift restrictions on using western weapons to strike deep into Russian territory.
“We could do much more to protect lives if the aviation of our European neighbours worked together with our F-16s and together with our air defence,” he said.
In recent weeks, Kyiv’s surprise incursion into Russia’s Kursk region has changed the mood and dynamic in the conflict, although it still remains unclear what Kyiv’s long-term plan for the area of Russian territory it controls is.
A Kremlin spokesperson told reporters that Russia would make “an appropriate response” to the incursion. He also dismissed increasing chatter that some form of negotiations between Moscow and Kyiv may be on the cards in the near future.
“There are a lot of reports about various contacts in the media, and not all of them are correct … ”, the spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, said. “The topic of negotiations at the moment has pretty much lost its relevance.”