Mykolaiv, Ukraine/Washington DC
Reuters
Russia has destroyed almost a third of Ukraine’s power stations in the past week, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Tuesday, as Moscow rained more missiles down on infrastructure in what Kyiv and the West call a campaign to intimidate civilians.
Missiles struck power stations in the capital Kyiv where they killed three people, and in Kharkiv in the east, Dnipro and Kryvyi Rih in the south, and Zhytomyr in the west, causing blackouts and knocking out water supplies. One man was killed in his flat that was destroyed in Mykolaiv in the south.
A local resident takes pictures of a building heavily damaged by a Russian missile strike, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in Mykolaiv, Ukraine, on 18th October. PICTIRE: Reuters/Valentyn Ogirenko
“The situation is critical now across the country…The whole country needs to prepare for electricity, water and heating outages,” Kyrylo Tymoshenko, deputy head of the Ukrainian president’s office, told Ukrainian television.
Russia has openly acknowledged targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure with waves of missile and drone strikes since the start of last week, in what President Vladimir Putin said was legitimate retaliation for a blast on a bridge.
Kyiv and the West say intentionally attacking civilian infrastructure is a war crime, and the attacks, aimed at leaving Ukrainians with no heat and power as winter arrives, are Putin’s latest tactic to escalate a war his forces are losing.
In a rare acknowledgement of the difficulties Russian forces are facing, their new commander Sergei Surovikin on Tuesday described the military situation in Ukraine as “tense”, especially around the occupied southern city of Kherson.
“The enemy continually attempts to attack the positions of Russian troops,” he told state-owned Rossiya 24 television news channel.
The Russian-installed chief of the Kherson region said some civilians from four towns would be evacuated, citing what he said was the risk of an attack by Kyiv’s forces.
In Mykolaiv in southern Ukraine, Reuters heard three explosions in the early hours of Tuesday. A missile completely destroyed one wing of a building in the downtown area, leaving a massive crater. A fire crew was seen pulling the dead body of a man from the rubble.
The Russians “probably get pleasure from this,” said Oleksandr, the owner of a nearby flower shop.
Zelenskiy said Russia was continuing to try to terrorise and kill Ukrainian civilians.
“Since Oct 10, 30 [per cent] of Ukraine’s power stations have been destroyed, causing massive blackouts across the country,” he wrote on Twitter.
Police officers shoot at a drone during a Russian drone strike, which local authorities consider to be Iranian-made Shahed-136 unmanned aerial vehicles, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in Kyiv, Ukraine, on 17th October. PICTURE: Reuters/Vadim Sarakhan
No negotiations
Zelenskiy reiterated his refusal to negotiate with Putin who he says heads a “terrorist state”.
A view shows the site of a plane crash, after a Sukhoi Su-34 supersonic medium-range fighter-bomber plunged towards the residential building, in the southern city of Yeysk, Russia, on 17th October. PICTURE: Reuters/Stringer
RUSSIA SAYS 13 KILLED IN FIGHTER CRASH NEAR UKRAINE
At least 13 people including three children were killed when a Sukhoi Su-34 fighter jet crashed into the courtyard of a nine-storey apartment building and exploded in a fireball in southern Russia just across the Sea of Azov from Ukraine.
The supersonic jet, which the defence ministry said was on a training flight, was seen on video footage speeding across the horizon on Monday with a fire in one engine before a blast and a fireball engulfed the building in the city of Yeysk.
Fire raged through several floors as what appeared to be ammunition exploded in the heat, to the shock of onlookers. The crew ejected shortly before the crash and one was shown lying on a street still attached to a parachute webbing.
Russia’s emergency ministry said 19 people had been injured. At least 10 bodies were pulled from the rubble of the building, the ministry said, while 360 people were evacuated.
“Thanks to the professional, competent and prompt actions of fire and rescue units, 68 people were rescued during the search and rescue operation in Yeysk,” Emergency Minister Alexander Kurenkov said in a statement.
Pictures from the scene showed a scorched building and the ash-white remains of the Sukhoi jet beside a blackened tree and a burned-out car next to the apartment building.
“According to the ejected pilots, the cause of the crash was a fire in one of the engines during takeoff,” TASS quoted the defence ministry as saying.
Investigators took fuel samples from the airfield, questioned the pilots who ejected and will examine the flight recorders.
“At the present time, the investigation considers the main version to be a technical malfunction of the aircraft,” Svetlana Petrenko, a spokeswoman for Russia’s investigative committee, said.
– Yeysk, Russia/Reuters
Zelenskiy ruled out negotiations with Putin last month after the Russian leader announced the annexation of four Ukrainian provinces. Putin has also called up hundreds of thousands of reservists and threatened to use nuclear weapons since mid-September, after his forces faced humiliating battlefield losses.
There was no immediate word on how many people were killed in Tuesday’s strikes overall. A day earlier, Russia sent swarms of drones to attack infrastructure in Kyiv and other cities, killing at least five people.
Moscow denies deliberately targeting civilians, though it has pummelled Ukrainian villages, towns and cities in what it initially called a “special military operation” to disarm its neighbour.
The Russian defence ministry repeated earlier statements that it was carrying out attacks using high precision weapons on what it described as military targets and energy infrastructure across Ukraine.
Ukraine accuses Russia of using Iran-made Shahed-136 ‘kamikaze drones’, which fly to their target and detonate. Iran denies supplying them and on Tuesday the Kremlin also denied using them.
However, two senior Iranian officials and two Iranian diplomats told Reuters that Tehran had promised to provide Russia with more drones as well as surface-to-surface missiles, a move sure to infuriate the United States and its allies.
The US State Department said Washington would continue to take “practical, aggressive” steps to make the sale of drones and similar weapons harder, and also expressed concern about what it called the deepening alliance between Russia and Iran.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said he would ask Zelenskiy to formally cut diplomatic ties with Iran in protest over the drones.
NATO will deliver air defence systems to Ukraine “in the coming days” to help the country defend itself against drones, the alliance’s secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg said.
“General Armageddon”
General Surovikin, Moscow’s new overall commander in Ukraine, has been nicknamed “General Armageddon” in Russian media after serving in Syria and Chechnya, where his forces pounded cities to rubble in a brutal but effective scorched earth policy against its foes.
His appointment was quickly followed on 10th October by the biggest wave of missile strikes against Ukraine since the start of the war.
Putin cast those strikes as revenge for an explosion that damaged Russia’s bridge to Crimea – the peninsula Moscow seized from Ukraine in 2014. Kyiv has not claimed responsibility for that attack but celebrated the destruction of what it considers a military target used to transport arms and troops.
A woman carries a dog at the site of a residential building heavily damaged by a Russian missile strike, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in Mykolaiv, Ukraine, on 18th October. PICTURE: Reuters/Valentyn Ogirenko
British Armed Forces minister James Heappey told BBC Radio that Surovikin was pursuing a cruel and pointless strategy that he said would fail in its aim of trying to “break the will of the Ukrainian people”.
The Kremlin said on Tuesday that the four Ukrainian regions it claims to have annexed were under the protection of its nuclear arsenal.
We rely on our readers to fund Sight's work - become a financial supporter today!
For more information, head to our Subscriber's page.
The statement comes as both NATO and Russia prepare to hold annual military exercises to test the readiness of their nuclear weapons forces. Russia’s defence ministry said on Tuesday two of its nuclear-capable Tu-95MS strategic bombers had conducted a flight of more than 12 hours over the Pacific Ocean, the Bering Sea and the Sea of Okhotsk.
Putin has previously said he is prepared to use nuclear weapons if necessary to defend Russia’s “territorial integrity”.
– With reporting by Reuters bureaux.
