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Barrage Of Russian Missiles Knocks Out Energy Facilities Across Ukraine

By RFE/RL's Ukrainian Service November 15, 2022

Russia launched a barrage of missiles against Ukraine on November 15, hitting energy infrastructure facilities in scores of regions and plunging the capital and other cities into darkness.

The barrage, which struck targets from east to west, killed at least one person in Kyiv, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said. The attack was strongly condemned by the United States, while President Volodymyr Zelenskiy warned that more attacks may be coming but said Ukraine "will survive everything."

White House national-security adviser Jake Sullivan said the missile strikes appear to have hit residential buildings the capital and elsewhere in the country.

Sullivan noted that the strikes occurred as world leaders meet at the G20 in Bali "to discuss the issues of significant importance to the lives and livelihoods of people around the world."

As those discussions take place, "Russia again threatens those lives and destroys Ukraine's critical infrastructure," Sullivan said in a statement. "These Russian strikes will serve to only deepen the concerns among the G20 about the destabilizing impact of [Russian President Vladimir] Putin's war."

Klitschko said a body was found by rescuers who responded to a strike on a residential building in the Pechersk district of the Ukrainian capital. Rescue and search operations are ongoing, Klitschko said on Telegram.

Klitschko said earlier that two residential buildings had been hit, but Kyiv authorities later raised that number to at least three.

The office of the president said most of the Russian rockets launched on November 15 hit energy infrastructure facilities in the center and north of the country, adding that the "situation is critical."

Kyrylo Tymoshenko, deputy head of Zelenskiy's office, described the situation in the capital as "extremely difficult" and said it had forced Ukrainian national energy company Ukrenergo to impose emergency power outages to balance the power grid and avoid equipment accidents.

Tymoshenko said the barrage was "another planned attack on energy infrastructure facilities," and he appealed to Ukrainians to hang on.

Attacks on critical infrastructure facilities were reported in the Lviv, Volyn, and Rivne regions in western and northwestern Ukraine, the Vinnytsya and Kirovohrad regions in south-central Ukraine, the Zhytomyr region in northern Ukraine, and the Kharkiv and Poltava regions in northeastern Ukraine.

A Ukrainian Air Force spokesman said Russia fired around 100 missiles; Zelenskiy put the number at 85.

The General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces said the consequences of enemy attacks on critical infrastructure facilities were being assessed. It said in its evening briefing on November 15 that Russian forces also continued shelling the positions of Ukrainian troops and settlements along the contact line.

Russia has recently intensified attacks on critical infrastructure facilities, especially energy facilities, leaving people in the cold and dark as winter approaches. According to the authorities, about 40 percent of the energy infrastructure in Ukraine had already been "seriously damaged" by Russian shelling before the fresh strikes on November 15.

The aerial assault came days after Ukraine retook the southern city of Kherson -- one of its biggest military successes in the nearly nine-month war.

The city is without power and water, and the head of the UN human rights office's monitoring mission in Ukraine, Matilda Bogner, decried a "dire humanitarian situation" there.

Speaking from Kyiv on November 15, Bogner said her teams are looking to travel to Kherson to verify allegations of nearly 80 cases of enforced disappearances and arbitrary detention.

With reporting by Reuters and AP

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/russian-missile-attack- energy-facilities-ukraine-kyiv/32132258.html

Copyright (c) 2022. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.