Russian drones and missiles attacked energy infrastructure across Ukraine on Monday morning, resulting in at least four fatalities. Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said 15 regions were affected in all.
UK slams Russian strikes as ‘cowardly’
British Foreign Secretary David Lammy has joined the US in condemning Russia’s barrage of attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure.
The strikes on Monday hit 15 of Ukraine‘s 24 regions, according to Kyiv, and overwhelmingly targeted the country’s energy sector.
“The UK utterly condemns Russia’s cowardly missile and drone attacks on civilian infrastructure across Ukraine today,” Lammy posted on X.
He also said he was “deeply saddened” by the death of a Reuters employee in a missile strike in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk.
A team of six people from Reuters were staying at the city’s Hotel Sapphire when it was hit in an attack on Saturday. Ryan Evans, a safety adviser for the news agency, was killed. One of the agency’s journalists, Ivan Lyubysh-Kirdey, remains in a critical condition.
US condemns ‘outrageous’ Russian attack on power grid
The United States has voiced anger over a major Russian attack on Ukraine’s power grid.
“We condemn in the strongest possible terms Russia’s continued war against Ukraine and its efforts to plunge the Ukrainian people into darkness as the fall sets upon us,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters, calling the assault “outrageous.”
Russia fired hundreds of drones and missiles at Ukraine early Monday, many of them targeting the country’s energy infrastructure.
Ukrainian officials said the attack, the largest staged by Moscow in weeks, killed at least four people and triggered widespread blackouts.Russia hits hydroelectric power station near Kyiv
A hydroelectric power station at Kyiv’s main reservoir has been damaged by a Russian airstrike, Ukrainian media reports say.
News agency UNIAN reported the strike after a footage of the damage appeared on Russian Telegram channels.
A fire in the turbine room of the hydroelectric power station and the road on the dam was damaged, the report said. After a barrage of overnight airstrikes, the military administration of the Kyiv region had only officially confirmed damage to two unspecified energy infrastructure facilities.
“It is pointless to hide this,” wrote the news agency. As reports emerged, Ukrainian authorities tried to allay fears of a possible destruction of the dam.
“There is no threat to the dam of the Kyiv Hydroelectric Power Station. It is impossible to destroy it with missiles,” Andriy Kovalenko, head of the Centre for Combating Disinformation, wrote on Telegram.
He said that the situation was not like that of the Kakhovka dam in southern Ukraine in 2023. Kovalenko stressed this had been blown up from the inside, with dozens of people drowning in the flood wave and the water caused severe damage in the downstream area.
The reservoir on the Dnipro River north of the Ukrainian capital is also known as the Kyiv Sea. It has a surface area of about 920 square kilometers (350 square miles) and holds 3.7 billion cubic meters (977.3 billion gallons) of water.
In previous attacks in the spring, the power plant facilities of both the Dnipro and Zaporizhzhya dam stages were damaged.
