A major Russian missile and drone attack caused serious damage to several power plants in Ukraine early Wednesday, Ukrainian officials said. It was Russia's fifth attack on energy facilities in the past month and a half, part of a broader campaign cutting off electricity in parts of the country and make life difficult for citizens.
Ukraine's largest private electricity company, DTEK, said in a statement that three thermal power plants had been hit, further straining Ukraine's electricity generation capacity, already reeling from previous attacks. The company said 80 percent of its available generation capacity had been damaged or destroyed by the recent attacks.
Ukrenergo, Ukraine's national electricity company, said it might have to turn off the power as a result, on Wednesday evening to some domestic and industrial customers. “You have to be prepared for this,” says Volodymyr Kudritskyi, the head of Ukrenergo, told the Ukrainian news media.
The attacks have hit Ukraine at a particularly difficult time. The country is facing a shortage of air defense weapons and ammunition while Western aid is at a standstill, meaning its ability to intercept airstrikes has been severely compromised.
The final attack – a day later Vladimir V. Putin was sworn in for a fifth term as president of Russia and a day before Russia celebrates the anniversary of its victory in World War II – also reflected Putin's confidence in the current war, in which his forces now have the upper hand on the battlefield.
The attacks also hit Ukraine on the day it, like most European countries, commemorates the Second World War. Ukraine moved the date back a day last year in an attempt to break with Soviet-era traditions.
“Today, everyone who remembers the Second World War and has survived it to this day experiences a sense of déjà vu,” said President Volodymyr Zelensky. said on social mediawhich draws comparisons between the Nazi and Russian invasions of Ukraine.
“Russia has brought its terrible past back into the daily news and has proven with each new crime that Nazism has been resurrected,” he said in a video he said was recorded in the basement of a building in a village in Russia. northern Ukraine where Russian troops held all the villagers captive at the start of the invasion in February 2022.
Early morning air raid sirens blared through Ukrainian towns and villages for hours on Wednesday, sending people scrambling for shelter and checking official social media channels to find out which Russian missiles were headed their way.
The Ukrainian Air Force said the attack involved 55 missiles and 21 drones, and that about 70 percent of the missiles and almost all the drones had been shot down. The breakthrough weapons hit energy facilities in central, western and southern Ukraine, including a gas storage facility and a power plant in the western Lviv region. according to the regional governor, Maksym Kozytskyi.
Days earlier, Russian shelling of power plants in the Sumy region of northeastern Ukraine left more than 400,000 people temporarily without electricity. The country's electricity system has been so damaged by Russian attacks that Ukraine imported 225,000 megawatt hours of electricity last month, according to Energy Company of Ukraine, the country's state energy trader – a record so far this year and a third higher than in March.
Mykola Bielieskov, a military analyst at Ukraine's government-run National Institute for Strategic Studies, said the attacks were intended “to inflict as much pain on civilians as possible, to make life untenable and the state dysfunctional.”
Ukraine has in recent months put pressure on its allies to supply the country with more air defense weapons and munitions, especially the US Patriot surface-to-air missile batteries – the only system proven capable of shooting down Russia's advanced ballistic missiles to fetch.
Spain said this on Monday that the promised Patriot missiles had arrived in Ukraine, without specifying how many. And on Tuesday, President Klaus Iohannis of Romania said he had discussed the possibility of sending a Patriot system to Ukraine with President Biden during a meeting at the White House.
But European partners have generally been reluctant to part with their limited stock of advanced air defense systems. And it may take weeks or months before some of the interceptors from the recently approved multi-billion dollar US military aid package reach the Ukrainian battlefield.
Maria Varenikova reporting contributed.