At least 12 people were injured Sunday evening in Russian strikes on Kharkiv, which caused power cuts in this large city in northeastern Ukraine, police and local authorities said.
These bombings come as the Ukrainian authorities fear the start of a new Russian campaign of attacks against the country’s civilian energy infrastructure, as in the winter of 2022 and 2023, a means then used by Moscow to submerge millions of Ukrainians. in the cold and the dark, and thus put pressure on kyiv.
“Around 10 p.m. (7 p.m. GMT), the Russians shelled three districts of Kharkiv (…) 12 civilians were injured, including seven women aged 22 to 83 and five men aged 21 to 38,” police announced. in a press release published on Telegram. According to the same source, “residential buildings, garages, gas stations, houses and cars have been damaged” and rescuers are mobilized to the affected sites. “Due to enemy strikes, there is no electricity in certain parts of the city,” Ukrainian police said earlier, without specifying how many homes were affected by these cuts.
The governor of the Kharkiv region, Oleg Synegoubov, and the mayor of the big city, Igor Terekhov, confirmed on Telegram power outages in “part” of the city. The two officials also did not detail the exact extent of the damage, nor did they specify which energy infrastructure had been affected. Kharkiv, a large city in the eponymous region in northeastern Ukraine, is very regularly the target of Russian fire. It is located less than 30 kilometers from the border with Russia.
In May, the Russian army attempted an offensive in this region bordering Russia, with the official aim of creating a buffer zone and thus limiting Ukrainian attacks against military or industrial targets on Russian soil. But this assault did not have the desired effect, kyiv continuing to target Russian territory on a daily basis.
In Kryvyï Rig (south), the hometown of President Volodymyr Zelensky, a missile strike also injured three people during the night and damaged homes, according to the town’s mayor, Oleksandr Vilkoul. On the other side of the front, two people were injured in Ukrainian strikes against the Russian region of Belgorod, according to its governor Vyacheslav Gladkov, who reported damage to civilian infrastructure.
