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Airstrikes cut power and water supplies to hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians on Tuesday, part of what the country’s president said was an expanded Russian effort to push the country into cold and darkness and make peace talks impossible.
President Vladimir Zelensky said nearly a third of Ukraine’s power stations had been destroyed in the past week, “resulting in widespread power outages across the country”. “There is no room to negotiate with the Putin regime,” he tweeted.
With the onset of winter, the lack of access to water, electricity and heat, and the widespread use of so-called suicide drones, which can swoop to targets, have opened a new phase in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war. Even far from the front lines, essential utilities are no longer deterministic, with daily strikes spreading far into the country and damaging critical facilities, sometimes faster than they can be repaired.
The most recent city to lose power is Zhytomyr, a military base, industry and tree-lined boulevard some 140 kilometers west of Kyiv. The entire city of 250,000 people initially lost power and water, the mayor said. Repairs quickly reconnected some homes, but 150,000 people remained without power in the hours following the morning strike, regional authorities said.
In the capital, Kyiv, missile strikes damaged two power facilities, killing two people, city authorities said. The facility’s operator said the attack left 50,000 people without power for hours. The missile also severely damaged an energy facility in the south-central city of Dnipro. Some homes were without power, but operators could not immediately say how many.
Russia is also mixing its attack methods.
Suicide drones set fire to an infrastructure in the partly Russian-occupied southern Zaporozhye region, the regional governor said.
Anti-aircraft S-300 missiles were used to hit the southern city of Mykolaiv, which Russia has been using as a ground attack weapon as its stockpiles dwindled.
In the eastern city of Kharkiv, eight rockets fired from the nearby border with Russia hit an industrial zone, the regional governor said.
Meanwhile, Russia said on Tuesday that a technical glitch caused a military plane to crash into a residential building in the nearby Ukrainian town of Yeysk a day earlier, killing 15 people and sparking an outcry from locals.
Kherson Evacuation
Russian troops are preparing to evacuate civilians from the Moscow-occupied southern Ukrainian city of Kherson, Russia’s military commander in charge of Ukraine operations said on Tuesday. General Sergei Surovkin, who has been in charge of operations in Ukraine for the past 10 days, told state TV Rossiya 24 that “the Russian army will first ensure the safe evacuation of the population” in Kherson, describing the situation as “very difficult”.
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