Ukraine accuses Russia of ‘energy terrorism’

Russia on Wednesday launched a new missile strike into Ukraine’s battered energy grid, depriving cities of power, water and some of its public transport, exacerbating winter hardships for millions. Airstrikes on power supplies also brought down nuclear power plants and internet links, causing a power outage in neighboring Moldova.

Several regions reported back-to-back attacks and cascading outages. Ukraine’s energy ministry said supplies to “the majority of electricity consumers” had been cut. The mayor of Lviv said tram and trolleybus services had been suspended as the city in western Ukraine lost both power and water. The capital’s mayor said water was lost throughout Kyiv. The mayor of Kharkiv, his second-largest city in Ukraine, said there was also a power outage and public transport had stopped.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has instructed Ukraine’s ambassador to the UN to request an urgent Security Council meeting.

Addressing this later on Wednesday, Zelensky said Ukraine would submit a resolution condemning “all forms of energy terrorism”. Referring to the possibility of Russia’s veto, he said, “It is nonsense to say that a veto is reserved for the parties that are waging this war, this criminal war.”

“We cannot be hostages to international terrorists,” Zelensky said, adding that the council must act.

He also asked the UN to send experts to investigate and assess Ukraine’s critical infrastructure.

Three people were killed and 11 injured in strikes in Kyiv, city officials said. Four people were killed and 35 injured in the wider Kyiv region, the governor said.

“I was going up the escalator when I heard an explosion. “When I got off the subway, there was smoke.”

For weeks, Russia has been bombarding power grids and other installations with missiles and exploding drones, damaging them faster than they can be repaired. About half of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure has already been damaged by the strike, and Zelensky said rolling blackouts had become a terrifying new normal for millions before the latest barrage.

Ukrainian officials believe Russian President Vladimir Putin hopes the misery of unheated and unlit homes in the cold and dark of winter will change public opinion against continuing the war. However, it is said that it rather strengthens Ukraine’s resolve.

The Ukrainian Air Force said Russia fired about 70 cruise missiles, shot down 51 and detonated five drones. The timing of the barrage afternoon _as it was last week_ workers struggled in the dark of winter to recover supplies.

In Kyiv, a city of 3 million people, water and heating will return to homes only on Thursday morning, the administration said.

Late Wednesday, after sunset, the deputy head of the Ukrainian president’s office said more than a dozen regions, including Kyiv and southern Lviv and Odessa, had been reconnected to the grid.

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Moldova, whose Soviet-era energy system is interconnected with Ukraine, also reported a second major blackout this month. President Maia Sandu accused Moscow of darkening her country of 2.6 million, and the foreign minister summoned the Russian ambassador to demand an explanation.

“We cannot trust a regime that leaves us in the dark and cold and deliberately kills people out of a simple desire to keep others in poverty and humiliation. I can’t,” said Sandu.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has called the wave of Russian attacks in recent weeks “intolerable” and said: “This bombing of civilians must stop immediately.”

UN Secretary-General Rosemary DiCarlo said at a Security Council meeting on Wednesday that the UN urged Russia to immediately stop attacks that violate international humanitarian law, stressing that “there must be accountability for violations of the laws of war”. did.

US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas Greenfield said Putin “was weaponizing the winter to inflict great suffering on the people of Ukraine”.

“He decided that if Ukraine cannot be taken by force, he will try to freeze the country into submission,” she said.

Ukraine’s state-owned nuclear operator, Energoatom, said all of Ukraine’s last three fully functioning nuclear power plants had been disconnected from the grid as an “emergency protection” measure. There was no change in radiation levels at the site, and “all indicators are normal,” he said.

The attack caused a temporary blackout at most thermal and hydroelectric power plants and affected power grids, according to the Department of Energy. A repair team was working on it, but “given the extent of the damage, it will take time,” he said on Facebook.

Wednesday’s outage also “caused the biggest internet outage in months in Ukraine and was the first outage to affect neighboring Moldova, after which it has partially recovered,” said network monitoring firm Kentic Internet. Director of Analytics Doug Madley said.

The onslaught follows an overnight Russian rocket attack in the town of Vilnyansk, near the city of Zaporizhia in southern Ukraine, which destroyed a hospital’s maternity ward, killing a two-day-old newborn and seriously injuring a doctor.

“The first S300 rocket hit the streets. “Two days ago a woman gave birth. She gave birth to a boy. Unfortunately, this rocket took the life of this child when she only lived for two days.”

On Twitter, Ukrainian First Lady Olena Zelenska wrote: We never forget and we never forgive. ”

The strike, now in its 10th month of Russian aggression, adds to the horrific tolls suffered by hospitals and other medical facilities, and their patients and staff.

They have been involved in firefights from the beginning, including the March 9 airstrike that destroyed a maternity hospital in the now-occupied port city of Mariupol.

In the southern city of Kherson, which Ukraine recaptured two weeks ago, many doctors are working in the dark without electricity, unable to use the elevators that carry patients to operating rooms, headlamps, cellphones, etc. , performing surgery using a flashlight. In some hospitals, key equipment has stopped working.

Volodymyr Malishchuk, Head of Surgery at Kherson Children’s Hospital, said:

After a strike in Kherson severely injured 13-year-old Artur Vobrikov on Tuesday, a team of medical staff carefully carried the sedated boy up six narrow stairs to an operating room where his left arm was amputated. Did.

Marishchuk said three children injured in the Russian strikes were in hospital this week. Picking up shrapnel fragments found in the stomach of a 14-year-old boy, he said the children arrived with severe head injuries and ruptured organs.

Artur’s mother, Natalia Voblikova, sat with her daughter in the dark hospital waiting for the operation to finish.

“You can’t even call[Russians]animals, because they take care of themselves,” Vobrikova said, wiping away tears. “But children… why kill children?”