2024-03-22 16:00:44
This content was published on March 22, 2024 – 5:00 p.m.
(Keystone-ATS) Ukraine suffered massive nighttime strikes on Friday which left at least five dead and led to large-scale power cuts. At the same time, the Kremlin recognized that Russia was at “war” after two years of euphemisms.
Eight Russian missiles notably hit Ukraine’s largest hydroelectric power station located on the Dnieper, the long river that crosses Ukraine, causing “very significant” damage but without immediate risk of the dam breaking, according to the prosecutor’s office. Ukrainian.
These attacks particularly targeted the Ukrainian energy network, leaving a total of 1.5 million people without electricity, according to the United Nations Ukraine monitoring mission.
The Russian army claimed to have acted in retaliation for recent military operations by kyiv against the regions located on the border with Ukraine, which were themselves responses to the daily bombing of Ukrainian cities.
At least five people were killed and around thirty others injured, according to local and national authorities, in the regions of Zaporizhia (south) and Khmelnytsky (west).
State of war
In Moscow, the spokesperson for the Russian presidency, Dmitry Peskov, admitted for the first time publicly that Russia was “in a state of war”.
Since the start of the invasion in February 2022, the Kremlin has repressed with fines and prison sentences the use of the word “war” to impose the euphemism “special military operation”.
Russian officials have sometimes used this term but to refer to the conflict that they accuse the West of waging against Russia through Ukraine.
“It started as a special military operation but, as soon as … the collective West participated in all this alongside Ukraine, for us it became a war,” Peskov said in a statement. interview with the media “Argoumenty I Fakty”.
Power outages
Russian forces launched more than 60 Iranian-made Shahed explosive drones and almost 90 missiles of different types into Ukraine overnight, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said.
He stressed that the targets of this attack had been “power plants, high voltage lines, a hydroelectric dam, residences and even a trolleybus”.
According to Yuriy Beloussov, an official with the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office, 136 energy installations were targeted, including DniproHES, Ukraine’s largest hydroelectric power station, which was taken out of service.
“The damage is very significant,” he said on television, noting that the site is “extremely important for Ukraine.” However, there is no risk for the population, he added.
These large-scale strikes led to power cuts in at least seven Ukrainian regions and damaged “dozens” of other installations, noted the Ukrainian operator Ukrenergo.
Ukraine’s second city, Kharkiv, which had nearly a million and a half inhabitants before the war, is deprived of electricity and heating because the bombings have “severely damaged” the energy infrastructure, lamented its mayor Igor Terekhov. He considered it the “most powerful” attack against this city since the start of the war.
One of the two power lines supplying the Ukrainian nuclear power plant in Zaporizhia, in the hands of Russian forces, was cut by a bombing, before being restored.
The United States has denounced “brutal” Russian attacks that demonstrate the need to support Ukraine, while Congress continues to block $60 billion in aid.
Paris condemned them “with the greatest firmness”.
One dead in Belgorod
The Russian army claimed to have reached “energy and military-industrial infrastructures, railway nodes, arsenals”, in response to recent Ukrainian bombings on Russian territory.
One person was killed and several others injured Friday morning in a strike on the Russian border region of Belgorod.
Russia had already launched a massive attack against kyiv at dawn on Thursday, the first against the capital since the beginning of February.
The commander of the Ukrainian land forces also judged on Friday “possible” a Russian summer offensive which would involve 100,000 men, while insisting on the fact that these were the “gloomiest forecasts” and that this contingent could also be intended to compensate for human losses.
The Russian army has claimed in recent months the conquest of villages in the face of Ukrainian soldiers lacking ammunition, but the front has been largely frozen for more than a year, with neither side achieving a real breakthrough.
Mr. Zelensky, for his part, was once again annoyed by the slowness of Western assistance, American aid having been blocked for months due to political rivalries between Republicans and Democrats and that of the European Union having taken an important delay.
“Russian missiles are not behind schedule, unlike aid packages to our country. The Shaheds are not undecided, unlike certain political leaders, he quipped.
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