Ukraine said on Friday it repelled a nighttime explosive drone attack launched by Russia less than 24 hours after massive new bombardments against energy infrastructure, depriving millions of Ukrainians of electricity.
Since October and a series of military setbacks on the front, Russia has adopted the tactic of hitting Ukrainian power stations and transformers with its missiles and drones, plunging the population into cold and black in the middle of winter.
Thursday’s attack, using dozens of missiles, was the tenth of its kind and was followed by a nighttime salvo of Shahed explosive drones, according to the Ukrainian Air Force, which claimed Friday morning to have downed the 16 Iranian-made aircraft that had been launched.
Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said seven of them targeted the capital and all were destroyed. Falling debris damaged the windows of two apartment buildings in a southwestern district of kyiv.
According to the Ukrainian presidency, other drones were shot down in the Cherkassy and Dnipro regions in the center of the country.
In a message posted on social media, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky stressed that the war was “tough” but said he was convinced “that Russian aggression would fail”.
Energy restrictions
According to an updated report, 58 of the 70 cruise missiles fired by Russia were shot down on Thursday. A total of four civilians were killed and eight others injured.
The Russian Ministry of Defense told him on Friday that its “massive strikes” the day before had “hit all the intended targets”.
Power cuts remained numerous, while power has already been heavily rationed across the country for weeks.
The millions of Ukrainians who do not have generators are therefore preparing to celebrate the New Year without electricity, sometimes without water or heating and under curfew.
According to the electricity company Ukrenergo, the “consequences of the damage on the functioning of the network are less than the enemy had expected […]but the situation in the south and east of the country remains difficult”.
In addition, “restrictions on consumption have been introduced in all regions” of Ukraine, she added, in a statement.
The operator of the capital DTEK said it had managed “to stabilize the situation in kyiv”, allowing a return to power cuts planned by district.
To cope, generators have multiplied in cities across the country. From kyiv to Lviv, these devices purr on the sidewalks to supply businesses and restaurants in particular and allow them to operate.
As the Russian invasion of Ukraine, launched on February 24, enters its tenth month, the fighting continues to rage, with a particularly bloody battle for Bakhmout, a city in the east that Russia has been trying to conquer since. months, and Kreminna, which Ukrainian forces are trying to retake.
Ukrainian soldiers to whom Agence France-Presse was able to speak reported fierce fighting in Kreminna, in the Lugansk region, as Russian troops resisted the Ukrainian offensive.
“They are not easy to defeat. They are good, they are tough,” says “Koulak”, a 24-year-old soldier met in Yampil, a village retaken at the end of September by Ukrainian forces, located about thirty kilometers west of Kreminna.
In the neighboring region of Kharkiv, at least two people were killed on Friday by Russian fire in Katerynivka, according to the Ukrainian presidency.
Russia was planning a lightning campaign but it had to give up taking kyiv in the spring, withdrawing from the north of the country, before abandoning the north-east in September, and part of the South in November, in the face of an over-motivated Ukrainian army. and strength of western weapons systems.
The West deprived of Russian wishes
Prospects for peace talks are almost non-existent.
Ukraine is demanding the total withdrawal of the Russian army, while Moscow wants kyiv to at least cede to it the four regions which the Kremlin has been claiming annexation since the end of September, as well as Crimea annexed in 2014.
Vladimir Putin presents his invasion, at the cost of heavy losses, as “a necessity”, assuring that the West was using Ukraine as a bridgehead to threaten Russia.
Russian-Western relations are therefore at their lowest, with Europeans and Americans stepping up sanctions against Moscow and increasing their military support for Ukraine.
The Kremlin thus clarified that the Russian president would not send Happy New Year wishes to American President Joe Biden, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz this year, “given the unfriendly acts that they are constantly undertaking”.
And Mr. Putin estimated Friday, during an interview by videoconference with the Chinese President, Xi Jinping, that the two countries were standing firm in the face of “unprecedented pressure and provocations from the West”.
He therefore advocated “strengthening cooperation between the armed forces of Russia and China”.