Russian strikes cut power to hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian families overnight, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Sunday. Repair crews are working in all four regions that were hit.
Substations, transformers and power lines that feed homes were among the targets in the Dnipro, Vinnytsia, Zhytomyr and Khmelnytskyi regions, he wrote in a post on X.
A heavy week
The overnight raid came at the end of an intense week. Zelenskyy counted 1,940 attack drones, more than 1,580 guided aerial bombs and 44 missiles fired at Ukraine over the past week. Thirty-six of the missiles were ballistic. Earlier this month, Zelenskyy reported 39 ballistic missiles fired at energy sites in a single night.
He said Russia is trying to make the most of Ukraine’s shortage of interceptors that can stop ballistic missiles.
Kyiv asks the U.S., Europe and other partners for Patriot missiles every day. Washington and European governments approved new packages for Ukraine this month, but Zelenskyy said those deliveries “cannot take years.”
“Russia is destroying infrastructure and killing our people right now, and it is betting on ballistic missiles this winter,” he wrote. Air defense decisions, he added, have to be carried out now.
Strike in Rostov region
Ukraine reported its own strike inside Russia. In a separate post, Zelenskyy said the country’s “long-range sanctions” had reached the Rostov region and hit the Kamensky Combine, a defense plant he said is involved in missile production. Ukraine has also resumed strikes on Russian refineries.
A Pantsir-S2 air defense system was struck too, along with a command and staff vehicle from an S-400 Triumf system. Zelenskyy valued the air defense equipment at about $70 million. He thanked the Security Service of Ukraine and other Defense Forces units.
His figures and his account of the Rostov strike couldn’t be independently verified.
Claims from occupied Luhansk
On the Russian side, Leonid Pasechnik reported a wave of Ukrainian drones. Pasechnik heads what Russia calls the Lugansk People’s Republic. He said air defenses and mobile units destroyed about 100 of them over the territory in 24 hours, Russian news agency TASS reported.
In a post on Max, he said the drones attacked vehicles, civilian infrastructure and utilities in four districts: Starobelsky, Sverdlovsky, Slavyanoserbsky and Stanichno-Luganskky.
Earlier, Pasechnik had said a Ukrainian attack overnight into Friday left 14 municipalities fully without power and the rest with partial outages. The threat of more strikes is slowing repairs, TASS reported.
None of his claims could be independently verified.
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