At least 3 killed, major power outages after Russian strike on Ukraine

by · UPI

Dec. 23 (UPI) -- Russian forces unleashed more than 650 drones and 38 missiles across Ukraine overnight, killing at least three people, including a young child, injuring 12 others and leaving many regions without power.

The airborne assault targeted 13 of Ukraine's 24 provinces, killing one person in the Kyiv region, one in the Khmelnytskyi region and a four-year-old girl was killed in the western Zhytomyr region, President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a post on X.

The Energy Ministry said in an online update that entire provinces, including Rivne, Ternopil and Khmelnytskyi in the west, were almost completely without electricity after damage forced network providers to implement emergency power outages.

DTEK, Ukraine's largest electricity production and distribution company, said it had introduced emergency power cuts, including in the capital province and Kyiv itself, as well as in Dnipropetrovsk, the country's industrial heartland.

The Vinnytsia, Chernihiv, Zhytomyr, Kharkiv and Donetsk regions were also affected while engineers in Odesa Oblast, in the southwest, were continuing to work to try to restore power to more than 120,000 residents after fresh strikes on Monday knocked out two power plants and destroyed a third.

Rescuers and energy workers would get to work at the earliest opportunity once it was safe to do so and that the power supply in the regions would be restored as soon as possible, the Energy Ministry said.

Temperatures in Ukraine were hovering at or below freezing point on Tuesday and forecast to fall as low as -10 degrees Celsius overnight with snow forecast in many areas.

Describing the attack as a "massive" assault targeting the "entire infrastructure of daily life" in Ukraine from the energy sector to apartment buildings and businesses, Zelensky said it sent a clear message.

"An attack ahead of Christmas, when people simply want to be with their families, at home, and safe. An attack carried out essentially in the midst of negotiations aimed at ending this war. Putin still cannot accept that he must stop killing. And that means that the world is not putting enough pressure on Russia," wrote Zelensky.

Ukrainian air defense systems brought down 34 of the missiles and 587 of the drones, according to the air force.

The aerial assault followed the killing of senior Russian general Fanil Sarvarov in a car bombing in Moscow on Monday morning that Russian authorities said they suspected was the work of Ukrainian intelligence.

Lt. Gen. Sarvarov was the third senior military commander to be killed in similar circumstances in the past year after Lt. Gen. Yaroslav Moskalik, head of the Main Operations Directorate of the General Staff, died in a car bombing in April and Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov was killed in December 2024.

Kirillov, who headed up Russia's Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Defense Forces, died along with an adjutant after an explosive device hidden in a scooter detonated as he left his apartment building in the Moscow suburbs.

Meanwhile, the governor of Russia's southern Stavropol region said Ukraine carried out a drone attack on a petrochemical plant overnight, setting it on fire. The report coincided with Russian Defense Ministry reports that air defenses had "intercepted" 29 Ukrainian aircraft.

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