The United States says it has evidence that Iranian troops are “directly engaged on the ground” in Crimea supporting Russian drone strikes against Ukrainian infrastructure and civilian populations.
The allegation came as Ukrainian citizens endured the first day of scheduled nationwide power cuts since the war began eight months ago so that repairs could be made to damaged or destroyed power plants as that winter is coming.
US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby told reporters that Iran has sent a “relatively small number” of personnel to Crimea, a part of Ukraine unilaterally annexed by Russia in violation of international law on 2014, to help Russian troops launch Iranian-made drones. against Ukraine.
“The information we have is that the Iranians have put trainers and technical support in Crimea, but it’s the Russians who are doing the piloting,” Kirby said.
US officials believe Iran may have deployed military personnel to help the Russians who were having difficulty using them due to technical problems.
Firefighters try to put out a fire in a building in Kyiv that was the target of a drone strike on Monday. Iran has since been sanctioned for supplying drones to Russia. (Roman Hrytsyna/The Associated Press)
“The Iranians decided to move in with some trainers and some technical support to help the Russians use them with better lethality,” Kirby said.
He indicated that the US would abandon its efforts to renegotiate a nuclear deal with Iran, both because of its involvement with the Russian military and its brutal crackdown on protesters after the September death of a woman who was arrested in Tehran for “improper clothing”.
There was no immediate public reaction to the US allegations from Tehran. Russia’s defense and foreign ministries did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Much of the recent destruction of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure has been inflicted by Russian drones, which Ukraine and the West say are Iranian-made, which Tehran denies.
Tetyana Safonova sits with her cat Asya while looking at her mobile phone during a power outage in Borodyanka on Thursday. Safonova was unable to buy candles, which were suddenly in high demand due to government-imposed power cuts aimed at saving energy. (Paula Bronstein/Getty Images)
The EU on Thursday imposed sanctions on Iran’s Shahed Aviation Industries as well as three generals in the Iranian armed forces for undermining Ukraine’s territorial integrity by helping supply Russia with drones. Britain also announced new sanctions on Thursday against Iranian officials and companies accused of supplying the drones.
Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian tweeted that he told the European Union’s foreign affairs chief that “the claim of sending Iranian missiles to Russia for use in the war with Ukraine is a claim baseless.”
“We have defensive cooperation with Russia, but certainly sending weapons and drones against Ukraine is not our policy,” he said.
Ukraine imposes energy cuts, blackouts
Ukrainians suffered power outages, including blackouts imposed by power grid authorities on Thursday, the first since the war began, to allow repairs to infrastructure destroyed by Russian airstrikes as Kyiv’s forces advanced toward in the city of Kherson.
As Ukraine advances against Russian troops in the east and south, it is struggling to protect power generation facilities and other public services from missile and drone attacks that appear designed to disrupt and demoralize as winter is coming.
A family warms up this Thursday around a fire in Lyman, in the Ukrainian region of Donetsk. Ukraine has ordered its population to reduce their energy use between 7am and 11pm as Russia continues to attack vital infrastructure, including power generation plants. (Carl Court/Getty Images)
People across the country were urged to use less energy as the government enforced national restrictions on electricity use between 7am and 11pm, the first such restrictions since the invasion of Russia on February 24, along with blackouts in some areas.
That followed a barrage of Russian attacks that President Volodymyr Zelenskyi said had hit a third of all power plants.
Meanwhile, the northeastern region of Sumy ran out of water as some grocery stores in Kyiv reported that sales of bottled water were picked up in preparation for possible shortages there.
“There is a lot of anger against the Russian leaders and the Russian people,” Mikhaylo Holovnenko, a Kyiv resident, told Reuters. “But we are prepared for disruptions. We have candles, charged power banks. Ukraine is loaded to win.”
People walk through a metro station in Kyiv at dusk on Thursday. Kyiv and Kharkiv are slowing down the use of electric public transport to help save energy. (Francisco Seco/The Associated Press)
Olaf Scholz, the German Chancellor, accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of using energy and hunger as weapons.
“Scorched earth tactics will not help Russia win the war. They will only strengthen the unity and determination of Ukraine and its partners,” Scholz told the German parliament.
Concern for winter survival
Ukraine’s Energy Minister Herman Halushchenko told national television that the government was seeking a 20 percent reduction in energy consumption as a result.
“We see a voluntary decline [in electricity consumption]. But when it is not enough, we are forced to do forced closures,” he said.
Volunteers deliver wood stoves to people in Mykolaiv on Tuesday. Ukrainians are facing a cold winter with restrictions on energy use due to the ongoing war with Russia. (Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters)
Kyiv and Kharkiv announced restrictions on the use of electric public transport such as trolleybuses and reduced the frequency of metro trains.
“We need time to restore power plants, we need a respite from our consumers,” Volodymyr Kudrytskyi, head of grid operator Ukrenergo, told Ukrainian television.
On Wednesday, Russian strikes damaged a power plant and another energy facility in the central Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih, cutting off electricity to its 600,000 residents.
The UN humanitarian coordinator in Ukraine, Denise Brown, said on Thursday that many Ukrainians displaced by the war were living in “collective centres” such as universities, training centers and former orphanages that were not well equipped for the winter , adding that people who spent months mostly in bunkers and underground would need long-term support to overcome the trauma.
Fear of attack from Belarus
The Ukrainian military’s general staff said there was a greater chance that Russian forces could launch an attack from Belarus aimed at cutting off supply routes for Western weapons and military equipment.
Oleksei Hromov, a deputy chief of the main operational department of the general staff, said Russia was deploying aircraft and troops to air bases and military infrastructure facilities in Belarus.
Meanwhile, Russian troops scrambled Thursday to regain lost ground in areas of Ukraine that Putin has illegally annexed.
Russian forces attacked Ukrainian positions near Bilohorivka, a town in the Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine. In the neighboring Donetsk region, fighting broke out near the town of Bakhmut. Kremlin-backed separatists have controlled parts of both regions for eight and a half years.
The Ukrainian army continued to try to advance towards the southern city of Kherson, the only regional capital that Russian forces have captured.
The Russian-appointed administration on Wednesday told civilians to leave the city, whose control gives Russia a land route to Crimea, which it annexed in 2014, and the mouth of the Dnipro River.
Russian President Vladimir Putin visits a military training center for mobilized reservists in Russia’s Ryazan region on Thursday. Putin has recently called up hundreds of thousands of reservists to help Russia’s war effort. (Sputnik/Mikhail Klimentyev/Kremlin/Reuters)
Putin declared martial law in Luhansk, Donetsk and southern Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions on Wednesday in a bid to assert Russian authority in the annexed areas after a series of battlefield setbacks and a troop mobilization with problems.