Feb 12 (Reuters) – Russia pounded Ukraine with drones and ballistic missiles overnight on Thursday, further battering its energy system and leaving tens of thousands in the capital Kyiv and the cities of Dnipro and \u200cOdesa without heat, power and water, officials said.<\/p>\n
Russia has intensified its winter campaign of strikes on Ukraine’s \u200cpower grid, plunging major cities into long periods of cold and darkness in freezing temperatures.<\/p>\n
In Kyiv alone, around 3,500 apartment buildings were without heating on \u200bThursday after the latest attack knocked out supplies to nearly 2,600 high-rises, on top of the 1,100 already affected by previous strikes, said Mayor Vitali Klitschko.<\/p>\n
More than 100,000 families were without electricity, according to private energy firm DTEK, which said one of its thermal power plants had been targeted but did not disclose the location.<\/p>\n
Two people were hurt in the attack on Kyiv, which \u200calso hit a residential building, Klitschko said.<\/p>\n
Ukraine’s \u2060air force said Russia launched 24 ballistic missiles, one cruise missile and 219 drones overnight. Air defences downed or neutralised 16 missiles and 197 drones, it said.<\/p>\n
KEY CITIES OF ODESA, DNIPRO \u2060ALSO HIT<\/p>\n
Nearly 300,000 people were left without water as the attack disrupted power supplies in the southern city of Odesa, said Deputy Prime Minister Oleksiy Kuleba. He added that close to 200 buildings in the strategic Black Sea port were left without heating.<\/p>\n
Military administration \u200bchief \u200bSerhiy Lysak said the attack also damaged an apartment building and \u200bsparked a fire that engulfed one of the \u200ccity’s markets, injuring one person.<\/p>\n
In the industrial southeastern city of Dnipro, a combined missile and drone strike wounded four people, including a baby boy and a four-year-old girl, regional governor Oleksandr Ganzha said on Telegram.<\/p>\n
Two people were killed and six more wounded in an attack on the railway hub of Lozova in the northeastern Kharkiv region bordering Russia, prosecutors said.<\/p>\n
Moscow has denied intentionally targeting civilians during the war although its attacks have killed thousands of them since it invaded at full scale \u200cin February 2022. Ukraine has also hit civilian targets in Russia \u200bor Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine during the war, though on a far \u200bsmaller scale.<\/p>\n
‘BLOW TO PEACE EFFORTS’<\/p>\n
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha \u200bcondemned the attack as undermining a peace push led by U.S. President Donald Trump to \u200cend the four-year war.<\/p>\n
U.S.-backed trilateral talks between Ukraine and \u200bRussia have so far failed \u200bto resolve key differences between the two sides, while Moscow has pressed on with a battlefield offensive and attacks on Ukrainian cities.<\/p>\n
“Each such strike is a blow to peace efforts aimed at ending the war. Russia must \u200bbe forced to take diplomacy seriously and \u200cde-escalate,” Sybiha wrote on X.<\/p>\n
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Wednesday the U.S. needed to put more \u200bpressure on Russia if it wanted the war to end by summer.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Anna Pruchnicka, Ron Popeski \u200band Valentyn Ogirenko; Editing by Michael Perry and Ros Russell)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Feb 12 (Reuters) – Russia pounded Ukraine with drones and ballistic missiles overnight on Thursday, further battering its…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":759177,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[7655],"tags":[180598,68419,91142,34057,209910,332,657,56548],"class_list":["post-759176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-russia","tag-apartment-buildings","tag-ballistic-missiles","tag-dnipro","tag-power-grid","tag-power-supplies","tag-russia","tag-ukraine","tag-vitali-klitschko"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116056979245444475","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/759176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=759176"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/759176\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/759177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=759176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=759176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=759176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}