At least four people were killed in attacks by Russian forces in various regions of Ukraine on Thursday, local authorities said, adding that electrical infrastructure, residential buildings and an industrial area were hit.
About a dozen people were injured in the attacks, they added.
Air-raid sirens sounded across Ukraine earlier in the day. In kyiv, the city’s military administration said air defenses shot down at least two cruise missiles and five Iranian-made drones.
With Kremlin forces on the ground being repelled, Russia has increasingly resorted in recent weeks to targeted airstrikes against power infrastructure and other civilian targets in various parts of Ukraine.
Ukrainian air defenses this week appear to have had much higher rates of successful shootdowns than during previous strikes last month, according to analysts. The improvement is partly due to Western-provided air defense systems, however some missiles and drones still manage to break through the Ukrainian defense.
Valentyn Reznichenko, governor of the eastern Dnipropetrovsk region, said a huge fire broke out in Dnipro after attacks in the city hit an industrial target. Eight people were injured, the official said, including a 15-year-old girl.
A Russian attack that hit a residential building killed at least four people overnight in Vilnius, in the Zaporizhia region. Rescue teams were going through the rubble looking for other victims, according to Kyrylo Tymoshenko, a senior official in Ukraine’s presidential office.
Russian strikes also hit the Odessa region in southern Ukraine and the city of Dnipro for the first time in weeks.
Infrastructure was affected in the Odessa region, Governor Maksym Marchenko said on the Telegram social network, warning of the threat of a “great deluge of missiles across the entire territory of Ukraine.”
Several explosions were also reported in Dnipro, where two local infrastructure targets were damaged and at least one person injured, according to Kyrylo Tymoshenko.
The authorities of the Poltava, Kharkiv, Khmelnytskyi and Rivne regions urged residents to stay in bomb shelters.
This attack follows another on Tuesday, which also resulted in a missile launch in Poland that caused two deaths.
Russia has increasingly focused on Ukraine’s power grid as winter approaches. The latest attacks come after days of euphoria in Ukraine sparked by one of its greatest military successes: the recapture of the southern city of Kherson last week.
The head of the Ukrainian presidential office, Andriy Yermak, described the attacks on energy targets as “naive tactics of cowardly losers”, in a post made today on the Telegram social network.
“Ukraine has already withstood extremely difficult attacks by the enemy, which did not lead to the results that the cowardly Russians expected,” Yermak wrote, urging Ukrainians not to ignore the air-raid sirens.
On the other hand, the UN Secretary General, António Guterres, announced an extension of the grain deal for four months to guarantee the safe delivery of Ukraine’s export grains, food and fertilizers through the Black Sea just a few days before expiration of this agreement.
Guterres said in a statement that the United Nations was also “fully committed” to removing obstacles preventing the export of food and fertilizer from Russia, which is one of two agreements reached between the two countries and Turkey in July. The agreements signed in Istanbul are intended to help reduce food and fertilizer prices and prevent a global food crisis.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called the extension of the grain agreement “a key decision in the global fight against the food crisis.”
There was no immediate confirmation of the deal from Russia.
Source: TSF
