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Russia launched dozens of missiles and drones on Sunday in what Ukraine’s foreign minister said was one of the biggest airstrikes of the war, hitting power plants across the country and killing residents of Kiev. Sent to bomb shelters.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said “a broad joint strike on all regions of Ukraine” was carried out overnight and into the morning.
He said that Russia has launched about 120 missiles and 90 drones. Ukraine’s air defenses — including anti-aircraft missiles, mobile fire units, electronic warfare groups and Western-supplied F-16 jets — shot down more than 140 of them, he added.
Ukraine’s Energy Minister German Galushenko said on Facebook that Russia had “targeted power generation and transmission facilities throughout Ukraine.”
As a precaution, emergency power cuts were imposed in several areas, he said. Ukraine’s largest private energy company, DTEK, reported that the attack affected the regions of Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk and Kiev.
Zelinsky said some installations were damaged by strikes and debris from falling missiles and drones. He confirmed that many parts of the country were without power, but said emergency crews were working to restore it.
People familiar with the matter told the Financial Times that last month, Ukraine and Russia tried to resume talks brokered by Qatar to stop attacks on each other’s energy infrastructure. Previous talks on the issue came close to an agreement in August before being derailed by Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk, the people said.
He was suspended again last week, said another person with knowledge of the discussions.
The attack on Sunday comes as both Ukraine and Russia jockey for leverage in a nearly three-year war ahead of Donald Trump’s return to the White House. The president-elect has vowed to force peace talks to end the war with Russia quickly.
In the biggest attack in late August, sirens blared through the night and into the morning in Kiev, while air force text alerts warned of incoming ballistic missiles and Iranian-made Shahid suicide drones. An FT reporter saw Ukrainian air defense intercepting missiles over central Kiev.
In response, the operational command of the Polish Armed Forces, a NATO member, wrote on X that Polish and allied jets had “extensively fired at the Russian Federation using cruise missiles, ballistic missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles. The attack has wreaked havoc in the second, western Ukraine.”
Ukrainian officials reported explosions and damage in about a dozen cities. Two people were killed and six injured, including two children, in the southern city of Mykolaiv, Zelinsky said.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Sibiha condemned the attack, calling it “one of the largest airstrikes” of the war, targeting “peaceful cities, sleeping civilians, fragile infrastructure”.
“This is a war criminal. [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s real reaction to all those who met him recently,” Sibiha added, criticizing German Chancellor Olaf Schulz and other Western leaders who recently met with the Russian president. .
“We need peace through strength, not appeasement,” Sibiha added.
Zelenskyy said on Friday that “Olaf’s call, in my opinion, is a Pandora’s box” because resuming contacts with Western leaders was “exactly what Putin wanted for a long time”.
Ukraine had been on high alert for weeks, fearing Moscow was stockpiling missiles in preparation for attacks on its energy infrastructure before winter.
After a relentless wave of drone strikes in October — more than 2,000 launched in Ukraine in all, and strikes every day but one — Russia kept its more advanced hypersonic and cruise missiles on hold.
Earlier strikes on Ukraine’s critical infrastructure in March and April caused nationwide blackouts and destroyed 9GW of the country’s electricity generation capacity.
Before Sunday’s bombing, Ukraine was already experiencing a bitter cold. DTEK estimated that in a best-case scenario, Ukraine could experience an average of five hours of power outages per day, assuming Russia refrains from further attacks and temperatures do not drop below -15°C.
But officials have warned that the country could be forced to endure blackouts of up to 20 hours a day.
