A large-scale Russian missile and drone attack damaged power plants and caused blackouts for more than a million Ukrainians on Friday morning, in what Ukrainian officials said was one of the war’s largest assaults on energy infrastructure.
At least five people were killed in the assault, and 23 others were injured, according to Ukrainian officials.
The strikes came as the Kremlin escalated its rhetoric over the conflict, saying that Russia was “in a state of war” in Ukraine — and moving beyond the euphemism “special military operation” — because of the West’s heavy involvement on the Ukrainian side.
In Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, traffic lights were not working and the water supply was disrupted. A fire raged at the country’s largest hydroelectric dam, in the southeastern city of Zaporizhzhia. A few dozen miles to the southwest, a power line supplying a Russian-occupied nuclear power plant was temporarily knocked out.
“The enemy is now launching the largest attack on the Ukrainian energy sector in recent times,” Herman Halushchenko, Ukraine’s energy minister, said on Facebook. “The goal is not just to damage, but to try again, like last year, to cause a large-scale failure of the country’s energy system.”
The Ukrainian Air Force said that Russia had launched 63 Iranian-made “Shahed” attack drones and 88 missiles in the assault, including hypersonic weapons that fly at several times the speed of sound. The air force said it had shot down most of the drones but fewer than half of the missiles, a low interception rate compared with previous assaults that may reflect Ukraine’s dwindling air-defense stocks.
“Russian missiles have no delays, unlike aid packages for Ukraine,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said on social media, an apparent reference to the $60 billion in military assistance for Ukraine that Republicans in the United States Congress have held up for months.
