Russia targets Ukraine's power network with strikes

Kyiv hits back with long-range drone attack on oil refineries

- CHRIS STEVENSON

Russian missiles have pounded power facilities across Ukraine - with Kyiv saying it had launched its own major long-range drone attack into Russia.

The airstrikes by Moscow, carried out with ballistic missiles and cruise missiles fired by Russian strategic bombers based in the Arctic Circle, are the fourth large-scale aerial assault targeting the power system since the last week of March.

“The enemy again massively shelled Ukrainian energy facilities,” said DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private electricity company, adding that four of its six thermal power plants had suffered damage overnight. Rescuers battled to put out fires at several energy facilities in the western regions of Lviv and IvanoFrankivsk, which border Nato members Poland and Romania, officials said.

After strikes on energy facilities in the central Dnipropetrovsk region, water supplies were disrupted in president Volodymyr Zelensky’s hometown of Kryvyi Rih, officials said. Ukrainian air defences brought down 21 of the 34 incoming missiles, the commander of the air force said in a statement. None of the facilities hit was identified by name, a security measure intended to prevent Russia quickly assessing the impact of its strikes.