Russian missile and drone strikes battered Ukraine’s power grid on Monday, killing at least four people and forcing authorities to introduce emergency blackouts.
Officials reported that 15 regions across the country were targeted in the aerial assault, which began during the night and was the largest in weeks.
The attacks coincided with Ukraine’s major cross-border offensive into Russia’s Kursk region, where Kyiv has been fighting for nearly three weeks and claimed on Sunday to be making progress.
“Russian terrorists have once again targeted energy infrastructure.
Unfortunately, there is damage in a number of regions,” Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmygal stated.
State-owned electricity operator Ukrenergo was compelled to initiate emergency power cuts to stabilize the grid, while train schedules were disrupted.
In the capital, Kyiv, explosions from air defenses were heard early on Monday, prompting residents to seek shelter in metro stations, according to AFP journalists on the scene.
“We are always worried. We have been under stress for almost three years now,” said Yulia Voloshyna, a 34-year-old lawyer sheltering in the Kyiv metro.
“It was very scary, to be honest. You don’t know what to expect.”
The Russian defense ministry claimed that the strikes targeted energy infrastructure used to support Ukraine’s defense industry.
Since the invasion in February 2022, Russia has launched numerous large-scale drone and missile attacks on Ukraine, frequently targeting energy facilities.
The strikes on Monday left four people dead and over a dozen injured across the country, officials reported.
Sergiy Lysak, governor of the central Dnipropetrovsk region, stated that Russian forces had attacked “en masse,” resulting in the death of a 69-year-old man.
In the southern Zaporizhzhia region, another civilian was killed, according to local governor Ivan Fedorov.
In Lutsk, an apartment building and infrastructure facility were hit, killing one person and injuring five others, as reported by the city’s mayor, Igor Polishchuk.
In the central Zhytomyr region, one person was killed and several others were injured, according to local authorities.
Russia also targeted railway infrastructure in the northern Sumy region, wounding a man and damaging buildings, as reported by Ukrainian Railways.
“Some railway stations, which were also cut off from power due to the outage in the city’s networks, have been switched to backup generators,” the national operator stated.
Energy facilities across Ukraine, including in the southern Odesa region, the Kyiv region, and the Lviv region, were targeted in the attack, leading to partial power outages in Lviv, according to governor Maksym Kozytskyi.
Four people were wounded in a missile strike on the southern Odesa region, including a 10-year-old boy, governor Oleg Kiper reported.
In the neighboring Mykolaiv region, “massive rocket fire” wounded three others, according to governor Vitaliy Kim.
An earlier attack on an industrial facility in the eastern Poltava region injured five people, as stated by governor Filip Pronin.
“The enemy is once again terrorizing the whole of Ukraine with missiles. The energy sector is in the crosshairs,” said energy minister German Galushchenko.
Andriy Yermak, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s chief of staff, emphasized that the attack demonstrated Kyiv’s need for permission to strike “deep into the territory of Russia with Western weapons.”
In the eastern Kharkiv region, authorities reported one resident killed by Russian rocket fire, though it was not immediately clear if this was part of the broader missile and drone assault.
The aerial barrage followed the killing of a safety advisor working for the Reuters news agency in a missile strike on a hotel in eastern Ukraine late Saturday.
“For all this, the world must not stop putting pressure on the terrorist state,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said in response to the strike, referring to Russia’s actions since the 2022 invasion.
Separately, Zelensky announced on Sunday that Ukrainian forces were advancing in the Russian region of Kursk, more than two weeks after Kyiv’s surprise incursion.
