Russia launches new air strikes on homes and power facilities in Ukraine

Russian air strikes inflicted more damage on Ukraine on Thursday with the latest barrage smashing into energy infrastructure, apartment buildings and an industrial site.At least four people were killed and more than a dozen wounded in drone and missile strikes around the country, authorities said.With the Kremlin’s forces on the ground being pushed back, Russia has increasingly resorted in recent weeks to aerial onslaughts aimed at energy infrastructure in parts of Ukraine it does not hold.In Kyiv, the city’s military administration said air defences shot down at least two cruise missiles and five exploding drones.Ukrainian air defences this week appear to have had far higher rates of successful shoot-downs than during previous barrages, analysts say, partly due to western-supplied weapons systems.The Russian strikes hit Dnipro and Ukraine’s southern Odesa region for the first time in weeks.Valentyn Reznichenko, governor of the eastern Dnipropetrovsk region, said a large fire erupted in Dnipro after the strikes hit an industrial target.The attack wounded at least 14 people, including a teenage girl, and all were being treated in city hospitals, Mr Reznichenko said.President Volodymyr Zelensky posted on Telegram a video that he said was one of the blasts in Dnipro. The video from a vehicle dashcam shows a fiery blast engulfing a rainy road.”This is another confirmation from Dnipro of how terrorists want peace,” he wrote. “The peaceful city and people’s wish to live their accustomed lives. Going to work, to their affairs. A rocket attack!”Homes destroyed by a Russian military strike in Dnipro on ThursdayElsewhere, a Russian strike that hit a residential building killed at least four people overnight in Vilnia in the Zaporizhzhia region. Rescuers were combing the rubble for other victims, according to Kyrylo Tymoshenko, a senior official in the Ukrainian presidential office.Critical infrastructure was also hit in the north-east Kharkiv region, in the area of Izyum, wounding three workers, the regional administration said.Dnipro mayor Borys Filatov said in a Facebook post that one of his staff was among the wounded and showed a photo of what he said was her coat pierced by a piece of shrapnel.An infrastructure target was hit in the Odesa region, governor Maksym Marchenko said on Telegram, warning of the threat of a “massive missile barrage on the entire territory of Ukraine”.Residents walk between captures Russian tanks and armoured vehicles in Kyiv on ThursdayOfficials in the Poltava, Kharkiv, Khmelnytskyi and Rivne regions urged residents to stay in bomb shelters.Thursday’s blasts followed a huge barrage of Russian strikes on Tuesday, the biggest attack to date on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure that also resulted in a missile hitting Poland.Russia has increasingly resorted to targeting Ukraine’s power grid as winter approaches as its battlefield losses mount.The most recent barrage followed days of euphoria in Ukraine sparked by one of its biggest military successes – the retaking last week of the southern city of Kherson.The head of Ukraine’s presidential office, Andriy Yermak, called the strikes on energy targets “naive tactics of cowardly losers” in a Telegram post on Thursday.”Ukraine has already withstood extremely difficult strikes by the enemy, which did not lead to results the Russian cowards hoped for,” he wrote, urging Ukrainians not to ignore air raid sirens.Associated Press