Ukraine’s energy infrastructure was “under massive enemy attack” on Thursday, the country’s energy minister said, after a national air alert was declared due to incoming missiles.
“Once again, the energy sector is under massive enemy attack. Attacks on energy facilities are taking place all over Ukraine,” German Galushchenko said in a Facebook post.
National power grid operator Ukrenergo “urgently introduced emergency power cuts”, he added, as temperatures across the country fell to freezing.
Energy supplier DTEK announced that Ukrenergo is introducing emergency power cuts in the Kyiv, Odesa, Dnipro and Donetsk regions.
The Ukrainian military said earlier Thursday that an air alert had been declared across the country “due to a missile threat” in a Telegram message. Missiles aimed at Kharkiv, Odessa and eight other regions were detected, according to other reports from the air force. “Kharkov, go to the shelters!” it warned.
Oleg Sinegubov, head of the Kharkiv Oblast Military Administration, said on Telegram that three strikes hit the Kievskyi district of Kharkiv, with no reports of casualties so far.
The mayor of Lutsk in northwestern Ukraine, Igor Polishchuk, said “explosions were heard again” in the city.
A senior UN official, Rosemary Di Carlo, this month condemned the rise in civilian casualties in the nearly three-year conflict between Ukraine and Russianoting that Moscow’s targeting of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure could make this winter “the worst since the war began.”
The latest missile salvo comes a day after US President-elect Donald Trump was declared a staunch loyalist and retired general Keith Kellogg as his envoy to Ukrainetasked with ending the Russian invasion.
A fixture on cable news, the 80-year-old national security veteran Kellogg co-authored an op-ed this year calling for Washington to use military aid as leverage for peace talks.
Kellogg told VOA at the Republican convention in July that Ukraine’s options were “pretty clear.” “If Ukraine doesn’t want to negotiate, fine, but accept the fact that you can have huge losses in your cities and accept the fact that your children will be killed, accept the fact that you don’t have 130,000 dead, you will have 230,000-250,000 he said.
