Damage to infrastructure after serious drone attack in Ukraine

2023-11-18 19:27:00

The Ukrainian Air Force announced on its Telegram channel that 29 of the 38 Shahed kamikaze drones launched across the country were intercepted on Saturday night. According to the Southern Command of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, a fire broke out in Odessa as a result of the drone strike. The fire occurred in an administrative building of an energy complex. One person was injured and the fire has now been brought under control, it said.

In Zaporizhzhia, four of eight drones were intercepted, military governor Yuri Malaschko said on Telegram. However, several infrastructure objects were also hit, causing a fire to break out there. There were no injuries.

According to authorities on Saturday, however, four residents were initially injured when a rocket hit the Ukrainian village of Komyshuwacha near the front. After rescue workers arrived on site, there was another attack in which two paramedics were killed and three others were injured, according to Ukrainian police.

Systematic attack on energy supplies

In addition to the Odessa and Zaporizhia regions, the neighboring regions of Mykolaiv and Kherson, the capital Kiev and Khmelnytskyi in western Ukraine also reported attacks during the night. Since last fall, Russia has systematically attacked energy supply facilities in the neighboring country in its war of aggression against Ukraine. Kiev is also expecting targeted attacks from Moscow against its own electricity, heat and water supplies this winter.

According to the British Ministry of Defense, neither Russia nor Ukraine are making significant progress in their fighting. “As colder winter weather sets in in eastern Ukraine, there are few immediate prospects of major changes on the front line,” the ministry in London said in its daily update on Saturday.

Intense ground fighting

In the past week, the most intense ground fighting took place in three areas: in the Kupyansk area on the border between the Kharkiv and Luhansk regions, around the city of Avdiivka in the Donetsk region and on the Dnipro River in the Kherson region, where Ukrainian forces have established a bridgehead on the actually on the Russian-occupied southern bank.

The United Nations has called on Moscow and Kiev to respect religious freedom in light of the war in Ukraine. The UN Assistant Secretary-General for Human Rights, Ilze Brands Kehris, criticized the arrest and torture of clerics in the Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories at the UN Security Council in New York on Friday. She also criticized the authorities in Kiev because these clergy of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOK) did not allow access to lawyers during house searches or put pressure on them to make a confession.

Disinformation and propaganda

Meanwhile, at Russia’s request, the UN Security Council discussed religious freedom in Ukraine for 90 minutes, which the Kremlin sees as threatened by Kiev’s actions against the UOK, which has long been linked to Moscow. Great Britain, France and the USA accused Russia at the meeting of trying to justify its own war against Ukraine with disinformation and propaganda, Kathpress reported on Saturday.