Photo: Andriy Andriyenko Associated Press Zaporizhzhia residents observe the damage caused by a Russian strike during the night from Thursday to Friday.
France Media Agency to kyiv
March 22, 2024
- Europe
Ukraine suffered massive nighttime strikes on Friday that left at least five dead and led to widespread power cuts, while the Kremlin acknowledged that Russia was at “war” after two years of euphemisms.
Eight Russian missiles notably hit Ukraine's largest hydroelectric power station located on the Dnieper, the long river which crosses Ukraine, causing “very significant” damage but without risk of rupture of the dam in immediately, according to the Ukrainian prosecutor's office.
These attacks particularly targeted the Ukrainian energy network, leaving a total of 1.5 million people without electricity, according to the United Nations Ukraine monitoring mission.
The Russian army claimed to have acted in retaliation for Kiev's recent military operations against the regions located on the border with Ukraine, which were themselves responses to the daily bombing of Ukrainian cities.
At least five people were killed and around thirty others injured, according to local and national authorities, in the Zaporizhia and Khmelnytsky regions.
In Moscow, Russian presidential spokesperson Dmitry Peskov admitted for the first time publicly that Russia was “in a state of war”.
Since the beginning of the invasion in February 2022, the Kremlin has cracked down with fines and prison sentences on the use of the word “war” to impose the euphemism “special military operation”.< /p>
Russian officials have sometimes used this term but to refer to the conflict that they accuse the West of waging against Russia through Ukraine.
“It started as a special military operation but, as soon as […] the collective West participated in all this alongside Ukraine, for us it became a war,” said Mr. Peskov in an interview with the media Argoumenty I Fakty.
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Power outages
Russian forces, for their part, launched more than 60 Iranian-made Shahed explosive drones and almost 90 missiles of different types on Ukraine overnight, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said.< /p>
He emphasized that the targets of this attack had been “power plants, high voltage lines, a hydroelectric dam, residences and even a trolleybus.”
According to Yuriy Beloussov, an official with the Ukrainian prosecutor's office, 136 energy facilities were targeted, including DniproHES, Ukraine's largest hydroelectric power station, which was taken out of service.
“The damage is very significant,” he said on television, noting that the site is “extremely important for Ukraine.” However, there is no risk for the population, he added.
These large-scale strikes led to power cuts in at least seven Ukrainian regions and damaged “dozens” of other installations, noted the Ukrainian operator Ukrenergo.
Ukraine's second city, Kharkiv, which had nearly a million and a half inhabitants before the war, is deprived of electricity and heating because the bombings have “severely damaged” the energy infrastructure, lamented its mayor Igor Terekhov. He considered it the “most powerful” attack on this city since the start of the war.
One of the two power lines supplying the Ukrainian Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, in the hands of Russian forces, was cut by a bombing, before being restored.
The United States denounced “brutal” Russian attacks that demonstrate the need to support Ukraine, as Congress continues to block $60 billion in aid.< /p>
Paris condemned these strikes “with the greatest firmness”.
A death in Belgorod
The Russian army claimed to have reached “energy and military-industrial infrastructure, railway hubs, arsenals”, in response to recent Ukrainian bombings on Russian territory.
Another person was killed and several others injured Friday morning in a strike on the Russian border region of Belgorod.
Russia had already launched a massive attack against kyiv at dawn on Thursday, the first since the beginning of February against the capital.
The commander of the Ukrainian ground forces also deemed a Russian summer offensive “possible” on Friday which would involve 100,000 men, while insisting that these were “the darkest forecasts” and that this contingent could also be intended to compensate for human losses.
In recent months, the Russian army has claimed the conquest of villages in the face of Ukrainian soldiers lacking ammunition, but the front has been largely frozen for more than a year, with neither side achieving a real breakthrough.
Mr. Zelensky, for his part, was once again annoyed by the slowness of Western assistance, American aid having been blocked for months due to political rivalries between Republicans and Democrats and that of the European Union having fallen significantly behind schedule.
“Russian missiles are not late, unlike aid packages to our country. The Shaheds are not undecided, unlike some political leaders, he quipped.