As reported by Al-Jazeera, on the night of 22 March 2024, Russia launched large-scale drone and missile attacks on Ukraine's energy production facilities.
Using around 90 missile units and 60 Shahed drones, the raid was recorded as one of the largest of its kind since the beginning of the war in 2022, despite the fact that such attacks on the energy network are part of an endemic Russian strategy against Ukraine.
This raid has left more than one million civilians without power across the country, including 700,000 residents in the Kharkiv region, at least 200,000 in the southern Odessa region, 200,000 in the south-eastern Dnipropetrovsk region, and another 110,000 in the central Poltava region.
The civilian population is forced to live without water and with no heating, aggravating the already difficult humanitarian situation for millions of people in the country.
Officials in Kyiv also reported that the attacks killed at least five people, including a woman, and many were injured.
As reported by BBC, Russian targets included Ukraine's largest dam, the DniproHES in Zaporizhzhia, which according to Ukrainian officials was hit at least eight times.
In addition, the bombing knocked out one of the power transmission lines feeding the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the most important nuclear power site in Europe, for almost five hours.
However, the plant continued to receive external electricity from a backup power line to continue cooling the reactor without interruption.
As reported by The Guardian, the Ukrainian energy minister, German Glaushchenko, said that the Russian goal is not to damage, but to try again, like last year, to cause a large-scale failure in the operation of the country’s energy system.
Russia routinely struck Ukrainian power and hydroelectric plants in the winter 2022 and 2023, leaving the civilian population without electricity for weeks.
UN News reports condemnation and criticism of these bombings by senior UN officials and agencies on the ground in Ukraine, stressing that attacks on civilians and infrastructure violate international humanitarian law and must end immediately.
To read more, visit:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68634444
https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/03/1147886
