Russia launched a massive airborne assault early Monday against 15 of Ukraine’s 24 regions, killing at least three people, injuring four and knocking out power and water supplies a day after the body of a British security adviser working with a internationa news team was recovered from beneath a hotel in Kramatorsk in the east of the country destroyed in a rocket attack Saturday night. Photo courtesy State Emergency Service of Ukraine/EPA-EFE
Aug. 26 (UPI) — Russia mounted a massive airborne assault early Monday against 15 of Ukraine‘s 24 regions, killing at least four people, injuring 13 and knocking out power and water supplies.
More than 200 missiles and drones targeted provinces across the country as local officials said a 69-year-old man was killed in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, a man was killed in a strike on a private residence in Zaporizhzhia Oblast, a woman was killed in Zhytomyr Oblast and another person was killed amid damage to an apartment building in the city of Lutsk.
Three people were injured in Ivano-Frankivsk in the west, three in Mykolaiv and four in Odessa in the south of the country and three in Kyiv province with blasts were reported in the capital, Kyiv, causing power outages in several districts with the knock-on effect disrupting water supply in the west of the city, according to Mayor Vitali Klitschko.
“There are power outages in several districts of the capital. As experts note, this is due to problems in the national energy network,” he said in a post on X.
“On the right bank of the Dnieper River, due to a power outage, there are interruptions in the water supply.”
The Kyiv Regional Military Administration said it had established “communal facilities” including phone charging and Internet access facilities for residents who had lost power to use.
Photos in local media showed residents waiting out the attack in the Kyiv subway, underground parking garages and underpasses.
State-owned Ukrenergo, which operates the national power transmission grid, issued an order implementing what it called an “an emergency blackout,” warning in a post on X that it was not possible during emergency shutdowns to say when normal supply would be restored.
Kharkiv as well as the south central provinces of Kremenchuk, Khmelnytskyi, Kropyvnytskyi, and Kryvyi Rih, as well as Lviv, Rivne and Vinnytsia in the west, were also targeted.
The Ukraine Air Force said on social media that MIG-31s from Russia’s Savasleika Airbase east of Moscow and 17 bomber aircraft were used to air-launch missiles followed up by at least 11 waves of attack drones and guided missiles from multiple directions, including the Black Sea.
Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba condemned the attacks which he said mainly targeted “critical civilian infrastructure and our energy system,” saying in a post on X that it was part of a “cowardly war against civilians,” making them war crimes.
The attacks came a day after a British security adviser for the Reuters news agency was killed and two journalists were injured, one of them seriously, in a Russian missile strike on their hotel in the eastern province of Donetsk.
Ryan Evans, 38, a former soldier in the British Army, was part of a six-person war-reporting team from the British news wire staying at the Saphire Hotel in Kramatorsk, a few miles west of the frontline with occupied Donetsk.
The U.S. State Department confirmed Sunday night that an American citizen was injured in the attack on the hotel.