KYIV, Jan 5 (Reuters) – Russia carried out five missile strikes on Ukraine’s second-biggest city Kharkiv on Monday, causing “very serious damage” to energy infrastructure, Mayor Ihor Terekhov said.
“This is not just an attack on facilities. It’s an attack on heating, on water, on people’s normal lives. They are trying to break us with fear and darkness,” he said on Telegram, without specifying the targets that had been hit.
Kharkiv’s regional prosecutors’ office said in a statement that at least one civilian was injured in the attack.
In a separate strike in the eastern city of Dnipro, an enterprise owned by major U.S. agricultural producer Bunge was hit, causing a leak of 300 tons of sunflower oil, said Borys Filatov, the mayor.
“Public utilities workers are cleaning up, spreading sand and gravel,” Filatov wrote on the Telegram messaging app, adding that the spill would close a major riverside road to traffic for two or three days.
WINTER BLACKOUTS
Kharkiv, with over a million inhabitants, is located close to the border with Russia. The temperature was around minus 3 degrees Celsius (27°F) during the day on Monday and will drop at night. According to the local electricity supplier, prior to the latest attack residents received electricity for an average of 14-16 hours out of 24.
Since November, Russia has sharply increased both the number and intensity of attacks on Ukraine’s energy system and logistics, plunging entire regions into darkness after large-scale missile and drone attacks.
A third of Ukraine’s capital Kyiv was left without heating after a vast Russian attack in late December, after Ukraine’s largest seaport, Odesa, was virtually cut off from power for several days following a series of attacks.
Russia also attacked stations that produced heat for Chernihiv and Kherson.
(Reporting by Yuliia Dysa and Pavel Polityuk; Editing by Peter Graff)