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Kyiv, Oct. 13 (AP) — After a spate of retaliatory missile strikes by Russia, unrelenting Western powers pledged to provide Ukraine with stronger air defenses, including temporarily removing Europe’s largest nuclear power plant from the invaded country’s power grid on Wednesday. downed missile.
Ukraine’s state nuclear operator said the Russian-occupied Zaporozhye nuclear power plant suffered a “blackout” after a missile damaged a distant substation.
The loss of power increases the risk of a radiation emergency because the plant needs power to keep its reactors from overheating.
Energoatom said the external power source was repaired after about eight hours, while the plant’s emergency diesel generators (which depended on an uncertain fuel supply in the war zone) provided backup, but a similarly dangerous outage could occur at any time.
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“Russia has seized the factory and has done nothing to de-escalate the situation. Instead, it is bombarding vital infrastructure on a daily basis,” the company’s news service told The Associated Press.
Russia launched a widespread missile strike on Monday in retaliation for a truck bomb that damaged a bridge connecting Russia to the Crimean peninsula that it annexed in 2014 and left hundreds of Ukrainian towns without power.
With repairs on the power grid still underway, Ukraine’s prime minister asked people to cut their energy consumption at night by 25 percent and prepare for winter by stocking up on essentials such as warm clothes, candles, flashlights and batteries.
Ukraine’s Western allies met at NATO headquarters in Brussels to adjust their responses as artillery fire that killed dozens of Ukrainians this week continued.
U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Mark Milley said Ukraine wanted its Western partners to provide it with a complete air defense system to counter Russian jets and missiles.
About 50 countries meet regularly to assess Kyiv’s needs and drum up equipment, Milley told reporters after a meeting of the Ukrainian Defense Liaison Group.
“What Ukraine is asking for, and what we think we can provide, is an integrated air defense missile system. So that doesn’t control all the airspace over Ukraine, but they are designed to control the priority targets Ukraine needs to protect,” Milley told reporters.
Andriy Yermak, head of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s office, said the meeting was “historic” because the decision to close the skies for Ukraine was being made there.
Ukraine has made strengthening its air defenses a priority, but NATO members are concerned about how to do so without triggering a wider war in Europe.
Zelensky’s office said at least 14 people were killed and 34 wounded in Moscow’s retaliatory strikes on the last day in the Zaporozhye region and the eastern Donetsk region. At least 19 people were killed in Monday’s opening attack, five of them in Kyiv.
A day after the Ukrainian Defense Ministry announced the arrival of the first of four IRIS-T air defense systems promised by Germany, the Dutch defense minister said her country would provide air defense missiles worth $14.5 million in light of recent Russian attacks.
“These attacks reinforce the government’s belief that they can only be dealt with with unwavering support for Ukraine and its people,” Defense Minister Kaisa Olongreh said.
“Like our partners, the Netherlands will not be intimidated by Russia.”
French President Emmanuel Macron promised a quick delivery of more artillery, as well as air defense systems and missiles, in a television interview late Wednesday.
The United States is expected to deliver two advanced NASAM air defense systems in the coming weeks.
The nuclear scare and promises of more Western support come amid a series of developments surrounding Russia’s 7 1/2-month-old invasion.
Moscow’s main domestic security agency said it had arrested eight people – five Russians and three Ukrainian and Armenian citizens – in the Kerch Bridge bombing between Russia and Crimea.
A truck loaded with explosives exploded as it crossed a bridge on Saturday, killing four people and causing parts of the road to collapse, Russian officials said.
The span opened four years after Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, as a symbol of Moscow’s dominance and an important route for military supplies to its troops in Ukraine and Russians to popular holiday destinations.
Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) said the detained suspects used forged documents to secretly transport explosives into Russia on orders from Ukraine’s military intelligence.
Andrei Yusov, a spokesman for the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, denied the allegations of his country’s involvement, telling reporters that “the entire activity of the FSB and the investigative committee is nonsense”.
Zelensky’s office said in a morning update that attacks on central and western Ukraine had ceased, but Russia continued to carry out shelling and attacks involving drones, heavy artillery and missiles in eight regions in the southeast.
More than a dozen missiles were fired at the city of Zaporozhye and its suburbs, damaging residential buildings. The city remains in Ukrainian hands as part of a larger region of the same name that Moscow has illegally annexed, while Russian troops control the area where the nuclear power plant is located.
In Nikopol, a city of 104,000 people across the Dnieper River from the factory, three people were seriously injured, including a 6-year-old girl.
Ukrainian authorities said more than 30 multi-storey residential buildings as well as private homes and schools were damaged.
Rafael Grossi, head of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency, said the plant had lost external power for the second time in five days, exposing again “how precarious the situation is”, and he reiterated his plea for a safe zone around the plant. . plant.
All six Zaporozhye reactors were stopped early due to the war. But they still need electricity to prevent them and their spent fuel rods from overheating to the point of melting, potentially releasing radiation into the atmospheres of Ukraine and other European countries, including Russia.
In the Donetsk region, Russian tanks shelled the city of Avdivka, damaging residential buildings and a market. Kyrylo Tymoshenko, deputy head of Zelenskyy’s office, said via Telegram that seven people were killed and eight injured.
The bombing over the past three days comes as Russian forces have lost ground in the past month in a Ukrainian counteroffensive in the east and south, which has drawn criticism from Russian hawkish commentators.
Earlier on Wednesday, Ukraine’s Southern Command said its forces had recaptured five settlements in the southern Kherson region on the western edge of the arc of Russian-held territory in eastern Ukraine and southern Ukraine.
Near the southern city of Mykolaiv, Ukrainian forces shot down nine Iranian Shahed-136 drones and destroyed eight Kalibr cruise missiles, the presidential office said. (Associated Press)
(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from the Syndicated News feed, the body of the content may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)
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