Kyiv woke to thick, acrid smoke. Explosions had punctuated the night, an air raid alert was still running, and the distant crack of air defence guns carried through the murk. Residents in several districts were told to keep their windows closed until it cleared.
Prime Minister Serhiy Koretskyi said the overnight barrage was the largest attack on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure since the spring, aimed mainly at Kyiv and the region around it. At least five people were killed. Eleven regions were hit, he said, and the targets included homes, social infrastructure, civilian businesses and railways as well as power sites.
“Since the summer, there has effectively not been a single day without enemy attacks on our energy infrastructure,” Koretskyi wrote on Telegram. A combined strike of this size, he added, had not happened since the end of the last heating season.
The dead and the damage
Kyiv regional head Timur Tkachenko said a child’s body was found under the rubble of a house. Mayor Vitaly Klischko reported three deaths in the capital, one of them a utility company worker killed at a warehouse. Another person died in the southern Mykolaiv region, according to acting regional head Heorhiy Reshetilov. In the north-eastern Sumy region, two people were killed on Tuesday and a school was hit in a separate strike, regional head Oleh Hryhorov said.
President Volodymyr Zelensky named the Zhytomyr, Mykolaiv, Kirovohrad and Rivne regions as places where critical infrastructure was struck.
DTEK, Ukraine’s biggest private energy company, described “a difficult night” for the capital and said power had been restored to 8,000 homes. On Wednesday the energy ministry reported that some households in the Kyiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Sumy and Kharkiv regions were still without electricity. Ukrenergo, the state grid operator, asked people not to run powerful appliances between 10:00 and 16:00 because supply was running below normal.
Trypilska in the crosshairs
Russia’s defence ministry said it had carried out massive strikes on Ukrainian facilities and named the Trypilska thermal power plant, about 40km from Kyiv, as one target. Moscow claimed the plant supplied electricity to Ukrainian defence sites. It is also the largest supplier of power to Kyiv. Centrenergo, which operates it, confirmed damage and said it was still working out how bad.
Ukraine had been bracing for this. Russia has gone after the grid every winter since the full-scale invasion began in 2022, and by mid-2024 the country was down to about a third of its pre-war generating capacity. Strikes on civilian power infrastructure are considered war crimes.
The Russian military said separately that it had shot down more than 380 Ukrainian drones overnight over several regions, Moscow among them. Ukraine’s military said it hit a number of Russian targets, including a drone warehouse in occupied Donetsk.
On the ground, the front line has barely moved. Russia holds about 20% of Ukrainian territory. Ukraine’s Third Army Corps said it had retaken several settlements near Lyman, in Donetsk, this week as part of a counter-offensive called Operation Vivaldi, and Zelensky visited troops in that area on Wednesday.
Sources
- Russia launches largest attack on Ukraine energy infrastructure since spring
- Russian strikes against Ukrainian infrastructure
