KYIV—Russia pounded Ukrainian power facilities on Friday in an attack described by Kyiv as the largest airstrike on its energy infrastructure in two years of war, and portrayed by Moscow as revenge for Ukrainian attacks during its presidential election.
The missile and drone attack hit a vast dam over the Dnipro river, killed at least five people, and left more than a million others without power, forcing Kyiv to seek emergency electricity supplies from Poland, Romania, and Slovakia, Kyiv officials said.
The Russian defence ministry said the airstrike was carried out in retaliation for Ukrainian shelling and cross-border raids last week as Russians took part in an election that handed President Vladimir Putin a fifth term.
Condemning the attack, Ukrainian Energy Minister German Galushchenko said: “The goal is not just to damage, but to try again, like last year, to cause a large-scale failure of the country’s energy system.”
Moscow says Ukrainian power facilities are legitimate targets and that such attacks are aimed at weakening Kyiv’s military.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told a Russian publication on Friday that Moscow saw itself as in a “state of war” because of the West’s intervention on Kyiv’s side.
The comment marked a rhetorical break from the “special military operation” language that Moscow officials have used throughout the invasion, in an apparent move to prepare Russians for a longer and harder struggle.
European Union Council President Charles Michel said Russia’s comments about war with Europe showed the importance of the EU building its own defence industry.
Two people were killed in the western Khmelnytskyi region and three in Zaporizhzhia in the southeast, including at least one at the dam, said the local administration and general prosecutor’s office. Twenty-six people were reported injured.
Ukraine’s largest dam, the DniproHES in the city of Zaporizhzhia, was hit eight times, an official from the Ukrainian prosecutor’s office said.
The state hydropower company said there was no risk of a breach. The company’s director, Ihor Syrota, said both its power blocks and the dam itself had been damaged. One of the blocks sustained two direct strikes, he said.
A state ecological inspectorate claimed that oil had leaked into the Dnipro river which the dam straddles.
Russia fired 88 missiles and 63 Shahed drones, of which only 37 and 55 were shot down respectively, the Ukrainian air force said of the attacks concentrated in the regions of Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, and Zaporizhzhia.
That represented a worse ratio than usual, possibly reflecting Moscow’s widespread use of ballistic missiles that are harder to hoot down and also the proximity of the targeted regions to Russian-controlled areas.
Some 1.2 million people in at least four regions were left without power due to the attacks, presidential aide Oleksiy Kuleba said on Telegram. Around 700,000 of those were in the eastern region of Kharkiv alone.
Ukraine’s largest private energy company, DTEK, said some of its thermal power plants had been hit. Ukraine’s state oil and gas company Naftogaz said its facilities had been damaged by the strike, without providing details of what had been hit.
