Ukraine says energy sector 'under massive enemy attack'

KYIV: Ukraine’s power infrastructure was “under massive enemy attack” on Thursday, the energy minister said, after a countrywide air raid alert was declared due to incoming missiles.

“Once again, the energy sector is under massive enemy attack. Attacks on energy facilities are taking place across Ukraine,” German Galushchenko said in a Facebook post.

National power grid operator Ukrenergo had “urgently introduced emergency power cuts”, he added, as temperatures across the country dropped to around 0 degrees Celsius (32 degrees Fahrenheit).

A senior UN official, Rosemary DiCarlo, this month denounced the rise in civilian casualties in the nearly three-year conflict between Ukraine and Russia, noting Moscow’s targeting of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure may make this winter the “harshest since the start of the war”.

Energy provider DTEK said Ukrenergo was introducing emergency power outages in the regions of Kyiv, Odesa, Dnipro and Donetsk.

Ukraine’s military said earlier Thursday that an air raid alert had been declared across the country “due to a missile threat” in a message on Telegram.

Missiles were detected headed for Kharkiv, Odesa and eight other regions, according to other messages from the air force.

“Kharkiv, go to the shelters!” it warned.

Oleg Synegubov, head of the Kharkiv region military administration, said on Telegram that three strikes had hit Kharkiv’s Kyivskyi district, with no casualties reported so far.

The mayor of Lutsk in northwestern Ukraine, Igor Polishchuk, said that “explosions were heard again” in the city.

Trump’s envoy

The latest missile salvo comes a day after US president-elect Donald Trump named staunch loyalist and retired general Keith Kellogg as his Ukraine envoy, charged with ending the Russian invasion.

Trump campaigned on a platform of securing a swift end to the Ukraine war, boasting that he would quickly mediate a ceasefire deal between President Volodymyr Zelensky and Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

But his critics have warned that the incoming Republican will likely leverage US military aid to pressure Kyiv into an agreement that leaves it ceding occupied territory permanently or agreeing not to join NATO.

A fixture on the cable news circuit, 80-year-old national security veteran Kellogg co-authored a paper this year calling for Washington to leverage military aid as a means of pushing for peace talks.

Ukraine has received almost $60 billion from Washington for its armed forces since Russia launched a full-scale invasion in February 2022, but with Trump taking over the White House, supporters fear the spigot will run dry.

“The United States would continue to arm Ukraine and strengthen its defenses to ensure Russia will make no further advances and will not attack again after a cease-fire or peace agreement,” Kellogg’s research paper for the Trumpist America First Policy Institute think tank said.

“Future American military aid, however, will require Ukraine to participate in peace talks with Russia.”