Ukrainian Energy Minister Herman Galushchenkodenounced this Thursday that Russia is launching a new “massive attack” against the country’s energy system and announced that the national electricity company, Ukrenergo, had ordered emergency power cuts to reduce damage to its infrastructure in the event of impacts.
According to the Ukrainian Air Force, several groups of Russian missiles were directed early in the morning against different regions of northern, central and southern Ukraine.
Ukrainian media say Russia also used drones in the attack.
Energy infrastructure in the region Lvivin western Ukraine, were hit in the attack, according to authorities. In the neighboring town of Rivne, 280,000 subscribers are deprived of electricity and there are water cuts. The attack also affected neighboring Volhynia.
The mayor of the northeastern city of KharkovIgor Terekhov reported on his social networks that the city was attacked by several missiles in the early hours of Thursday.
Ukrainian anti-aircraft alerts were also activated in the capital, Kyivand the Russian army reached the infrastructure located in the northeastern region of Sumi.
Since last March, Russia has launched massive, combined attacks on Ukraine’s electricity system a dozen times. Following these attacks many Ukrainian power plants were damaged and the country has lost a good part of its production and distribution capacity.
The last of these attacks took place on November 17 and forced Ukraine to reintroduce planned power cuts to save energy due to the production deficit caused by the destruction of attacked infrastructure equipment.
kyiv has repeatedly warned of Russian intentions to leave Ukrainians without electricity during the coldest time of the year in order to demoralize the population and undermine the country’s economy.
