Police officers stand guard in front of a building in Kyiv’s Percherskyi district after it was badly damaged in a massive Russian drone and missile assault on the Ukrainian capital overnight that also cut power to hundreds of thousands of residents. Photo by Sergey Dolzhenko/EPA
Oct. 10 (UPI) — Electric power supply was restored to more than a quarter of a million residents of Kyiv on Friday after massive Russian drone and missile attacks overnight targeted energy infrastructure across the country.
Russian forces launched more than 450 drones and 30 missiles, causing power outages in nine regions and killing a child and injuring 24 other people, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and officials in Kyiv, Zaporizhzhia and Dnipro.
The attacks forced authorities to shut off the power grid in several regions despite Ukrainian air defenses downing or disabling most of the drones and around half of the missiles, which included Kinzhals, an air-launched “hypersonic” weapon capable of speeds in excess of 7,800 mph.
The assault on Kyiv began with waves of drones shortly before midnight, escalating to ballistic and cruise missile strikes in the early hours.
Hundreds of thousands of people in the east of the city lost power, which also affected the water and gas supply, and a residential building in the downtown Percherskyi district was badly damaged after it was set ablaze by falling debris from drones.
Officials in other areas of the city reported problems with subway service and other public transit.
At least 12 people were injured.
The private DTEK power company said it was working flat out to get the power back up and running.
Zelensky said Moscow was “targeting everything that sustains normal life, everything the Russians want to deprive us of.”
In Zaporizhzhia, a 7-year-old boy was killed and seven other people were injured. The attack on the city in the part-Russian-controlled province followed the same pattern as that on Kyiv, with ballistic missile strikes following on from drones.
A major blaze occurred in a residential building after it was struck by a drone and utility cables, heating systems and gas supply infrastructure were damaged.
Five people were injured in neighboring Dnipropetrovsk province.
Emergency power restrictions were also implemented elsewhere in the capital region as well as in Poltava, Sumy, Donetsk, Chernihiv, Cherkasy, Odessa, Dnipropetrovsk and Kharkiv provinces.
A DTEK thermal power plant was damaged and one worker was injured in the attacks, the third time one of the company’s plants has been targeted in the past few days. Two other DTEK employees were injured in an overnight attack on Tuesday.
DTEK CEO Maxim Timchenko condemned the attacks as a “serious escalation in Russia’s campaign against Ukraine‘s energy system — both its generation capacity and grid network.”
The attacks came amid a sharp rise in Russian strikes targeting Ukraine’s sources of heat as winter approaches, with attacks overnight Tuesday and Wednesday taking out at least one thermal power plant as well as energy infrastructure in the Odessa, Chernihiv, Kherson and Dnipropetrovsk regions.
“It is precisely the civilian and energy infrastructure that is the main target of Russia’s strikes ahead of the heating season,” Zelensky said.
Analysis published by Bloomberg on Thursday found Ukraine had lost more than 50% of its natural gas production capacity to the attacks.