Ukrainian power plant damaged in Russian attack: statement

KYIV, Ukraine: A Ukrainian power plant was struck in an overnight Russian attack, the plant’s operator said Thursday, in the latest missile and drone barrage targeting Ukrainian energy facilities.

The targeted Russian strikes over recent months have crippled Ukrainian electricity generation and have forced officials to introduce rolling blackouts and to import supplies from abroad.

“Another difficult night for the Ukrainian energy industry. The Russians attacked one of DTEK’s thermal power plants,” the company said in a statement, adding that an attack caused “serious damage” and wounded three employees.

It said this was the seventh “mass” attack on Ukrainian power plants over the last three months.

Ukraine’s national grid operator Ukrenergo said early Thursday that there had been a “massive strike on objects of civil energy infrastructure” the night before.

“Equipment at facilities in Vinnytsia, Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Kyiv regions got damaged,” it added, though the extent was still “being clarified”.

President Volodymyr Zelensky has said that the attacks have halved generator capacity in the war-battered country compared to one year ago and urged allies to send more air defence systems to protect vital infrastructure.

Ukraine’s air force said that Russia had launched nine missiles and 27 Iranian-designed attack drones, and that air defence systems had downed all the projectiles except four missiles.

“Critical infrastructure objects were attacked. The main direction of the attack was the east of Ukraine, in particular Dnipropetrovsk region,” the air force said, one of the regions in which DTEK operates.

It said air defence systems were also activated in the regions of Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk, Kherson, Kharkiv and Kyiv, among others.

-AFP