Fifteen civilians were killed in a Russian shelling of Kherson in southern Ukraine on Friday, two weeks after the forced withdrawal of Russian troops from this strategic city, while millions of homes are without power across the country due to strikes from Moscow.
Russia’s strategy of targeting critical infrastructure as Ukraine plunges into winter temperatures is a “war crime” for Ukraine’s Western allies and labeled a “crime against humanity” by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
The deadliest shelling in recent days hit Kherson: “15 residents of the city were killed and 35 injured, including a child,” Galyna Lugova, an official in the city’s military administration, told the networks. social. She said several “private homes and high-rise buildings” were damaged.
“The Russian invaders opened fire on a residential area using multiple rocket launchers. A large building caught fire,” Yaroslav Yanushevich, governor of the Kherson region, said earlier. “Due to the constant Russian shelling, we are evacuating patients from hospitals in Kherson.”
Ukraine’s Ministry of Reintegration of the Temporarily Occupied Territories said in the evening that a train had left Kherson for Khmelnytskyi “with the first 100 citizens of Kherson benefiting from government evacuation, including 26 children, seven bedridden patients and six people disabilities”.
The Russian withdrawal from Kherson, which Moscow hoped to make its base in occupied southern Ukraine, has reshuffled the cards in this nine-month-long war. The city is strategically located to connect the Crimean peninsula, annexed by Russia since 2014, and the Ukrainian port of Odessa to the west.
At the same time, more than six million Ukrainian homes were affected by power cuts on Friday, two days after massive Russian strikes against the country, according to Volodymyr Zelensky. “Tonight, cuts continue in most regions and in kyiv,” added the head of state in his daily address.
On Friday evening, the electricity network had lost “30%” of its capacity, the operator Ukrenergo said on Telegram, while this lack was “15-20%” on Wednesday morning. “We expect to go through the weekend with a deficit of around 25%. This figure is already close to that before the last attack, but still a bit too high. Therefore, the timetables for the restrictions will be maintained, ”clarified the operator.
“Enduring this winter”
kyiv — with some 600,000 homes without electricity in the evening — and its region, as well as the provinces of Odessa (south), Lviv, Vinnytsia (west) and Dnipropetrovsk (center-east), are the most affected by the cuts, he added, calling on Ukrainians to save electricity in areas where power has been restored.
“We have to endure this winter — a winter everyone will remember,” President Zelensky wrote on Facebook.
He had visited earlier in the day Vyshgorod, a city north of kyiv where the strikes left six dead and dozens injured on Wednesday.
Engineers continued to repair the damage across the country.
In the capital, “a third of kyiv’s homes already have heating, specialists continue to restore it. Half of the users are still without electricity,” said its mayor, Vitali Klitschko.
In her apartment where the gas for the kitchen and the heating were disconnected, Albina Bilogoub explained that her children now all slept in one room to keep warm.
“It’s our life. A sweater, then a second, a third. We live like this now,” she said.
Faced with these massive Russian bombardments, Ukraine received anti-aircraft defense systems from the West, but it would need more to neutralize Moscow’s missiles and drones.
Paris and Berlin “will support Ukraine until the end of this conflict”, assured French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne in Berlin, alongside German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. “Since day one of this brutal war, our two countries have provided unwavering support to Ukraine,” Ms. Borne said.
The German Chancellor judged for his part that “Russia’s policy of terror by bombs against civilian infrastructure in Ukraine must end”. He recalled that Germany and France were working to help Ukraine “rebuild its energy infrastructure”, which was partly destroyed.
Visiting Ukraine on Friday, British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly also announced new aid to Ukrainians, in particular the dispatch of ambulances and “support” for “survivors of sexual violence perpetrated by the Russian army”.
Poutine with mothers
On Friday, AFP journalists saw queues of cars waiting to refuel in front of several gas stations in kyiv and the operation of mobile phone networks was still disrupted in some neighborhoods.
Russia, for its part, claims to only target military infrastructure and has blamed the power cuts on the Ukrainian anti-aircraft defense. The Kremlin assured that Ukraine could end the suffering of its people by accepting Russian demands.
Russian President Vladimir Putin met soldiers’ mothers for the first time on Friday, saying he shared their “pain” and called on them not to believe the “lies” about the offensive launched on February 24 by the Kremlin in Ukraine.
Mr. Putin attacked “enemies in the information field” who, according to him, seek to “devalue, discredit” the Russian offensive in Ukraine. “We have to achieve our goals, and we will achieve them,” Putin said.
Russian diplomacy has also denounced the resolution of the European Parliament which this week qualified Russia as a “State promoter of terrorism”. Moscow claims that this decision “has nothing to do” with the fight against terrorism.
Ukraine will boycott the work of the OSCE assembly after the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe did not change its rules to exclude Russian representation, according to Ukrainian MP Yevgeniya Kravchuk.