More than 1 million Ukrainians without power amid Russian strikes
Overnight Russian air strikes have left more than 1 million Ukrainians without electricity, regional officials said on Thursday.
“As of now, 523,000 subscribers in [the] Lviv region are without electricity,” regional head Maksym Kozytskyi said in a post on social media.
Meanwhile, in the northwestern Rivne region more than 280,000 households were left without power, regional head Oleksandr Koval said. Some schools in Rivne were ordered to study remotely.
Strikes were also reported in the Volyn region, where 215,000 households have no electricity, according to the head of administration, Ivan Rudnytskyi.
The head of Ukraine’s presidential office, Andrii Yermak, claimed that Russia had stockpiled missiles to strike Ukrainian infrastructure during the cold season.
Ukraine reports ‘massive attack’ against energy infrastructure
Explosions rang through the Ukrainian cities of Odessa, Kropyvnytskyi, Kharkiv, Rivne and Lutsk on Thursday amid reports of a major Russian cruise missile attack, Ukrainian media said.
Ukraine’s energy minister said that the strikes targeted critical infrastructure.
“Once again, the energy sector is under massive enemy attack,” Ukrainian Energy Minister German Galushchenko said on Facebook.
“Attacks on energy facilities are taking place across Ukraine.”
The minister added that the national power grid’s operator had “urgently introduced emergency power cuts.”
Putin is banking on the failure of NATO, says German spy chief
The head of Germany’s foreign intelligence service BND has warned about increasing Russian hybrid attacks on Germany and the NATO defense alliance, with the underlying aim to test the alliance in hopes that it would collapse.
Bruno Kahl said BND believes that high-ranking officials in Russia’s Defense Ministry seem to have doubts about whether NATO’s mutual defense commitments and the United States’ extended deterrence in Europe would hold in a serious situation.
“Currently, there is no evidence of concrete war intentions by Russia. But if such views gain ground in the government headquarters in Moscow, the risk of a military confrontation also grows in the coming years,” he said at an event held by the German Society for Foreign Policy late on Wednesday.
Kahl said he did not believe Moscow would engage in such a confrontation to gain territory, but rather to stamp out NATO.
“Certainly not expansive territorial acquisition would be the focus,” he said, but Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aim is for NATO to fail as a defense alliance, the spy chief stressed.
