Russian drone and missile attacks hit energy infrastructure in eight Ukrainian regions overnight, causing blackouts, Ukraine’s energy ministry said on Saturday.
Russia used 653 drones and 51 missiles in the wide-reaching attack overnight into Saturday, which triggered air raid alerts across the country and came as Ukraine marked Armed Forces Day, the country’s air force said.
Ukrainian forces shot down and neutralised 585 drones and 30 missiles, the air force said, adding that 29 locations were struck.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said energy facilities were the main targets of the attacks, also noting a drone strike had “burned down” the train station in the city of Fastiv, in the Kyiv region.
Mr Zelenskiy wrote on X: “The attack was meaningless from a military point of view, and the Russians could not have been unaware of this.”
At least eight people were wounded in the attacks, Ukrainian minister of internal affairs Ihor Klymenko said. Among these, at least three people were injured in the Kyiv region.
Drone sightings were reported as far west as Ukraine’s Lviv region.
Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant temporarily lost all off-site power, the International Atomic Energy Agency said, citing its director-general Rafael Mariano Grossi.
The plant is in an area under Russian control since early in Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine and is not in service, but it needs reliable power to cool its six shut-down reactors and spent fuel to avoid any catastrophic nuclear incidents.
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A railway hub near Kyiv was also attacked, with its depot and railway carriages damaged, Ukrainian state railway company Ukrzaliznytsia said. The railway did not report any casualties from the overnight attack in the town of Fastiv.
Russia has intensified its assaults on Ukraine’s energy sector and infrastructure in recent weeks, targeting power stations and railway hubs.
Power and heat generation facilities in Chernihiv, Zaporizhzhia, Lviv and Dnipropetrovsk regions were targeted in the attack, Ukraine’s ministry for development of communities and territories said.
It said 9,500 customers remained without heat and 34,000 without water supply in the southern Odesa region.
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“Port facilities [in Odesa] have also been attacked: part of the infrastructure has been de-energised, and operators have switched to backup power from generators,” the ministry said.
The attacks come ahead of a third day of talks between United States president Donald Trump’s advisers and Ukrainian officials on Saturday after making progress on finding agreement on a security framework for post-war Ukraine.
The two sides offered the sober assessment that any “real progress toward any agreement” will ultimately depend “on Russia’s readiness to show serious commitment to long-term peace”.
The statement from US special envoy Steve Witkoff, Mr Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner as well as Ukrainian negotiators Rustem Umerov and Andriy Hnatov came after they met for a second day in Florida on Friday.
They offered only broad brushstrokes about the progress they say has been made as Mr Trump pushes Kyiv and Moscow to agree to a US-mediated proposal to end nearly four years of war.
Previous diplomatic attempts to break the deadlock have come to nothing and the war has continued unabated.
Separately, sirens sounded early on Saturday in Lubartow in the Lublin region of eastern Poland, broadcaster RMF FM reported.
RMF quoted local mayor Krzysztof Pasnik as saying the warning was activated due to the situation in Ukraine.
Poland scrambled jets overnight due to the Russian attacks on Ukraine, but the operational command of the armed forces said there were no airspace violations.
Meanwhile, local governors in Russia said on Saturday that Ukrainian drones targeted Ryazan and Voronezh regions overnight, causing damage but no casualties.
The attack sparked a fire on the roof of a multi-storey residential building, and debris from drones fell into the grounds of “an industrial facility,” Ryazan governor Pavel Malkov said.
Ukraine has ramped up drone attacks deep inside Russia, aiming to knock out oil refineries, depots and pipelines. Ukrainian drones have struck at least 17 major refineries this year.
In the Voronezh region, governor Alexander Gusev said a drone strike damaged a fuel station, a school and several residential buildings.
Russia’s defence ministry said its air defences shot down 116 Ukrainian drones overnight. – Reuters/AP