KYIV: Russian missile and drone attacks killed at least three Ukrainians, including a child, on Tuesday, triggering widespread emergency power cuts and prompting neighbouring Poland to scramble jets.
The attacks, days after another round of US-led talks to end the nearly four-year-old war, hit energy facilities in western regions the hardest, Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko said.
Poland, a NATO member bordering western Ukraine, said Polish and allied aircraft were deployed to protect Polish airspace after Russian strikes targeted areas near the border.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Russia had targeted at least 13 regions as Ukrainians prepared to celebrate Christmas with their families in an attack that showed Russian President Vladimir Putin was not serious about peace talks.
Damaged Chernobyl shelter could collapse,
says plant director
“Putin still cannot accept that he must stop killing,” Zelenskiy wrote on X. “And that means that the world is not putting enough pressure on Russia. Now is the time to respond.”
Child killed
A four-year-old child was killed in the central Zhytomyr region, another person in Khmelnytskyi in western Ukraine, and a third person outside the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, where local officials said at least five were also wounded.
Russia’s defence ministry said it had attacked Ukrainian energy and military facilities and captured two villages along the front line in Ukraine. There was no immediate comment from Kyiv, which often disputes Russian reports of territorial gains.
Moscow has stepped up strikes on Ukrainian energy and logistics to boost pressure on Kyiv as it seeks to alter the terms of a US-backed peace deal. Ukraine has targeted Russian energy exports.
A Ukrainian overnight drone attack sparked a fire at an industrial facility in Russia’s southern Stavropol region, the region’s governor, Vladimir Vladimirov, said.
Authorities also reported a fire at the fuel oil supply pipeline at the port of Taman in the Krasnodar region, saying it had been put out.
Shell collapse
A Russian strike could collapse the internal radiation shelter at the defunct Chernobyl nuclear power station in Ukraine, the plant’s director said.
Kyiv has accused Russia of repeatedly targeting the facility, the site of a 1986 meltdown that is still the world’s worst ever nuclear disaster, since Moscow invaded in February 2022.
A hit earlier this year punched a hole in the outer radiation shell, triggering a warning from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that it had “lost its primary safety functions.”
In an interview, plant director Sergiy Tarakanov said fully restoring that shelter could take three to four years, and warned that another Russian hit could see the inner shell collapse.
“If a missile or drone hits it directly, or even falls somewhere nearby, for example, an Iskander, God forbid, it will cause a mini-earthquake in the area,” Tarakanov said in an interview conducted last week.
