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Kyiv, Ukraine – Russia hit Ukraine with another missile barrage on Wednesday, hitting energy infrastructure and critical residential areas and causing blackouts across the country, including in the capital Kyiv and Lviv in the west.
At least four people were killed in the Kyiv region, Governor Oleksiy Kuleba said, and at least 34 were injured, including five children.
As Moscow persisted in its relentless bid to leave millions of Ukrainians without electricity, heat and water during the cold winter months, the European Parliament in a symbolic vote on Wednesday designated Russia a “state sponsor of terrorism”, citing the his “brutal and inhuman”. acts” against ordinary citizens.
In a video address to the UN Security Council, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called for a “firm reaction” to the carnage. “In our midst,” he told the council, which included Russia’s ambassador, “you have the representative of a state that offers the world nothing but terror” and should not participate “in any kind of vote on its terror “.
“This is a dead end,” Zelensky told the emergency meeting, called by the United States and Albania to discuss the Russian attacks. “We need your decision.”
U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said Russian President Vladimir Putin’s motive “could not be clearer and more cold-blooded. … He has decided that if he cannot seize Ukraine by force, will try to freeze the country into submission.”
But while condemnation of the Russian strikes was widespread, several members of the African council, along with India, China, Brazil and others, expressed concern that near-weekly meetings on the crisis were failing to much and called for renewed diplomacy. to stop the war
In addition to what Ukraine’s main electricity grid operator Ukrenergo said on its Telegram channel were blackouts in “all regions” of the country, the Energy Ministry said the strikes had also caused temporary outages at all nuclear power plants under Kyiv’s control. as in “most thermal and hydroelectric plants”.
Power was also cut in most of neighboring Moldova, where the power grid is connected to Ukraine. Foreign Minister Nicu Popescu posted on Twitter that he had summoned the Russian ambassador for “explanations”.
Ukraine’s energy systems on the brink of collapse after weeks of Russian bombing
Ukraine’s air force said it had shot down 51 of the 70 missiles launched on Wednesday and also destroyed five self-destructing drones. The military administration of the city of Kyiv reported that of the 31 missiles fired at the capital, 22 were intercepted by air defense systems.
Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko also said the city’s water supply would be temporarily cut off, and as night fell large parts of the city were without power. The strikes also left all of Lviv, the largest city in western Ukraine, without power, Mayor Andriy Sadovyi said on his Telegram channel.
“While someone is waiting for the results of the World Cup and the number of goals scored, Ukrainians are waiting for another score: the number of intercepted Russian missiles,” Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Zelensky, wrote on Twitter while the bombing was underway .
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Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has insisted that the bombing is for military purposes and will continue until Moscow’s war aims are achieved.
An early morning missile attack crushed the maternity ward of a hospital in Vilnyansk, a city in the Zaporizhzhia region, killing a two-day-old boy.
The rocket, which Zelensky said was launched by Russia, hit the hospital at 2 a.m. as a mother slept next to her newborn’s crib, according to the hospital’s medical director, Valeria Kroshena.
The strike destroyed the maternity ward on the second floor and the clinic below, bringing the brick walls of the building to the ground. The blast also injured a doctor who was on duty overnight and is now recovering from severe burns, Kroshena said.
According to Kroshena, a different doctor, who delivered the baby, was off duty and rushed to the hospital as soon as he heard the explosion. The doctor knew the only patients in the hospital that night were the mother and her son, Kroshena said, and he knew exactly where they were. The mother, who is in her 30s, was not injured. The boy was their fourth baby, Kroshena said. “It’s unthinkable,” he said.
On Wednesday afternoon, rescuers used excavators to dig out what was left of the maternity ward. Some rooms remained partially standing, with pieces of the roof collapsed onto hospital beds and a cot. The windows of the building next door were shattered and shattered by the blast.
The missile was a Russian-made S-300, local authorities said.
The attack in Vilnyansk, about 20 kilometers northeast of the city of Zaporizhzhia, the regional capital, came less than a week after another missile hit a residential building in the same city, killing 11 people Zaporizhzhia is one of four regions of Ukraine that Putin has claimed have been annexed by Russia, a violation of international law.
Despite Putin’s claims of annexation, Russia has not taken the city of Zaporizhzhia and has also withdrawn from the city of Kherson, the only regional capital it had seized since the start of the full-scale invasion scales in February.
Two of those killed in the previous strike in Vilnius were also young, aged 10 and 15.
Following the Russian withdrawal from the city of Kherson, attention has focused on the Zaporizhzhia region as the most likely site for a new Ukrainian counter-offensive, which could push south towards the occupied city of Melitopol and the hydroelectric power plant and the critical Kakhovka dam in the Kherson region.
Russian bombs lash the suburb of Kherson in the shadow of a destroyed bridge
Wednesday’s vote in the European Parliament, the European Union’s 27-member legislature, reflected continued anger in Brussels and across Europe over Russia’s invasion and the outbreak of a full-scale war on the European continent over first time in the 21st century.
Konstantin Kosachev, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Federation Council, Russia’s upper house of parliament, said Wednesday’s European Parliament resolution violated international law and that a state cannot be labeled a terrorist.
“Russia has always firmly opposed the concept of ‘state terrorism,'” Kosachev wrote in a statement posted on Telegram, adding: “The collective West is actively trying to introduce the principle of collective responsibility. lective and punish all “objectionable” countries and regimes simply because there is an alternative point of view and a different model of behavior”.
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In his response to the UN Security Council, Russian Ambassador Vasily Nebenzya said Russia’s attacks were designed to weaken “the military capability of our opponents” and were carried out with “precision”. He charged that Western-supplied weapons were responsible for much of the damage to residential areas and other civilians and chastised the international community, saying it had not shown the same concern for what he described as Ukrainian war crimes.
The Pentagon said Wednesday it would fast-track an additional $400 million in military assistance to Ukraine, including additional air defenses to counter Russia’s “relentless and brutal” missile and drone attacks on the country’s civilian infrastructure.
The package contains an unspecified number of munitions for the two NASAMS surface-to-air systems that Washington has provided, in addition to 150 heavy machine guns equipped with thermal sights to help Ukrainian forces detect and shoot down drones. More than 200 power generators will also be shipped from US stocks.
Schmidt reported from Vilnius. Francesca Ebel in London and Karen DeYoung in Washington contributed to this report.
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