Russian strikes cut heat to thousands of Kyiv buildings
Anna Pruchnicka and Olena Harmash |
Russia has launched a combined drone and missile attack on Ukraine, knocking out power and heating supplies to thousands of apartment buildings in Kyiv amid freezing temperatures, Ukrainian officials say.
Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said the Russian attacks cut heating supplies to 5635 multi-storey residential apartment buildings.
One person was wounded, debris damaged a school building, and water supplies were disrupted on the left bank of the city of more than three million people, he said.
Regional officials said one person was killed in attacks in the wider Kyiv region and two petrol stations damaged.
It was the second major attack on the energy sector and other critical infrastructure in the Ukrainian capital so far in January as temperatures hover well below 0C.
“Thousands of houses are without heating in Kyiv at -15°C outside, following Russia’s mass strike overnight,” Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said in a message posted on social media platform X on Tuesday.
“(Russian President Vladimir) Putin’s barbaric strike this morning is a wake-up call to world leaders gathering in Davos: support for the Ukrainian people is urgent.”
Sybiha reiterated the call for urgent additional energy assistance, air defence, and interceptors from Ukraine’s allies.
As the war with Russia approaches its four-year mark, diplomatic efforts to find a way to end the conflict have yielded no tangible results so far despite pressure from US President Donald Trump on both Kyiv and Moscow.
Kyiv has already been suffering from severe power and heating outages following previous strikes on the city earlier in January, and dozens of repair crews have worked around the clock for more than a week to restore supplies to residents.
Klitschko said that out of the buildings that were hit in the latest attack, 80 per cent had already been struck in the previous attack.
Yaroslav Zhelezniak, a lawmaker from the Holos party, said on the Telegram app that parliament’s support office would work remotely on Tuesday due to a lack of water and heating in the building. There were no parliamentary sessions scheduled on Tuesday.
Russian strikes also damaged energy and other critical infrastructure in Vinnytsia, Dnipro, Odesa, Zaporizhzhia, Poltava and Sumy regions, Sybiha said.
In the eastern Dnipropetrovsk region, a production facility was hit, and two people were wounded, officials said.
Reuters
