Three killed in overnight Russian drone strikes on Ukraine as power crisis continues

Three people were killed and at least 14 more were injured in Russian drone strikes on Ukrainian cities overnight, the Ukrainian authorities said on Monday.

According to the State Emergency Service of Ukraine, a Russian drone struck a residential building in the city of Bohodukhiv in the eastern Kharkiv region, sparking a fire that killed a woman and a 10-year-old boy and injured three other people.

In the southern port city of Odesa, Russian forces carried out a “massive” overnight drone strike that damaged several residential buildings and a gas pipeline, killing one person and injuring two others, Odesa region Governor Oleh Kiper said.

The governor of Ukraine’s central Dnipropetrovsk region, Oleksandr Hanzha, said that an overnight Russian drone strike on the city of Shakhtarske had caused a fire in a three-storey building and injured nine people, one of whom was in a “serious” condition.

In the northwestern Volyn region, a Russian strike on an electricity substation in the city of Novovolynsk caused “significant damage” and left some 80,000 people without power, Mayor Borys Karpus said.

On Sunday evening, the authorities in Kyiv reported that Russia was targeting the city with ballistic missiles, but there were no reports of damage as of Monday morning.

That attack came just hours after Ukraine’s power grid operator Ukrenergo warned that the situation in the country’s energy sector remained “difficult” following numerous Russian strikes last week, including an attack overnight on Friday that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said had targeted “facilities critical to the operation of Ukraine’s nuclear power plants”.

“This is a level of attack that no terrorist in the world has ever dared, and Russia must feel the world’s response,” Zelensky said.