Russia fired dozens of missiles at infrastructure in Ukraine on Friday, causing an emergency power outage across the country and killing and injuring people in their homes in the south, Ukrainian officials said.
Russian-installed personnel in occupied eastern Ukraine also reported civilian casualties from Ukrainian shelling at two locations.
The latest Russian offensive comes after warnings from Ukrainian officials that Moscow is planning a new all-out offensive early next year, a year after it devastated much of Ukraine. But little of it was brought under Russian control.
As many as 60 Russian missiles were spotted heading toward Ukraine, the governor of the Mykolaiv region in southern Ukraine, Vitaly Kim, said on Friday, while the governor of the Kyiv region, Oleksiy Koliba, said Russia was conducting a “massive attack”. .
Russia has rained missiles on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure almost weekly since early October following its defeat on the battlefield. Moscow says it is part of a plan to disable Ukraine’s military, which Kyiv says is a war crime.
“A Russian missile hit a residential building in Kriviyreh,” regional governor Valentin Reznichenko wrote on Facebook. “The staircase was destroyed. Two people were killed. At least five were injured, including two children. All are in hospital.”
Russian troops are now embroiled in an attempt to seize territory in the south and east of around a fifth of Ukraine. Fighting along the front line is brutal, with many soldiers on both sides thought to have been killed or wounded, although detailed reports of military casualties are not released by either side.
Russian-installed officials said civilians were killed in two locations in the latest Ukrainian shelling.
Eight people were killed and 23 wounded in the village of Lantratyuka, a small settlement near the border with Russia in Ukraine’s Russian-controlled Luhansk region, the region’s Russian-installed administrator said on Friday.
Leonid Pasechnik described the attack as “barbaric”.
He said Ukraine was targeting residential neighborhoods, schools and shopping districts in an effort to “kill as many people as possible.” He did not provide evidence and there was no immediate comment from Keef.
The head of a separatist, self-styled “people’s militia” in Luhansk said a civilian was also killed by Ukrainian shelling in the town of Swatovo, about 70 kilometers (40 miles) further south, on Friday morning.
Reuters was unable to immediately confirm the latest accounts from the battlefield but recorded at least three explosions in the snow-covered capital Kyiv, sending smoke billowing over parts of the city. It was not clear if any of the missiles had gone through the air defense system.