Russia’s military said it successfully hit several Ukrainian energy infrastructure facilities in the latest round of missile strikes fired at the war-torn country Monday.
“The Russian Armed Forces continued to launch strikes with high-precision long-range air and sea-based weapons against Ukrainian military and energy facilities,” the Defense Ministry said in an update on its Telegram channel.
“The goals of the strikes were successful. All assigned objects were hit,” the post said.
Several Ukrainian cities including the capital Kyiv reported explosions and cruise missile strikes Monday morning. The strikes knocked out 18 targets, most of which were energy facilities, according to Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal.
“Missiles and drones hit 10 regions, where 18 sites were damaged, most of them energy-related,” Shmyhal wrote on Telegram. “Hundreds of settlements in seven regions of Ukraine were cut off.”
The strikes on Kyiv left 350,000 apartments across the capital without electricity and 80% of the city’s residents without water, according to Mayor Vitali Klitschko.
Monday’s flurry of strikes is the latest in a wave of missile and drone attacks targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in recent weeks, with almost one-third of the country’s power stations and other energy facilities allegedly destroyed.
They come days after Russia blamed Ukraine and “British specialists” for a drone attack on its Black Sea Fleet in the port city of Sevastopol in annexed Crimea. London denied any involvement in the attack.
Kyiv and its Western allies have repeatedly said that targeting civilian infrastructure amounts to a war crime.
“Russian strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure are terrorism and an attempt to freeze millions of civilians. They want to leave people with no light, water and sewage — in winter, in the cold,” Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser for Ukraine’s interior ministry, said in a tweet Monday.
Fighting has intensified across southern and eastern Ukraine in recent days as Russia continues its push to capture all of eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region and Ukraine carries on with a counteroffensive to retake Russia-held areas.
Ukraine’s Armed Forces claimed hundreds of Moscow’s troops were killed in fighting across the country over the weekend.