Russia-Ukraine war latest: Putin launches ‘massive’ cruise missile attack on Ukraine energy grid

Russia hit Ukraine with a “massive” missile attack on energy infrastructure across several cities overnight, officials said. It represents Russia’s second big attack on the besieged country’s energy grid this month.

Officials confirmed massive blasts and power cuts across the country, affecting hundreds of thousands of people.

“Energy infrastructure is once again targeted by the enemy’s massive strike,” Ukrainian energy minister German Galushchenko wrote on Facebook. Ukraine’s national grid operator Ukrenergo introduced emergency power cuts amid the attack, Mr Galushchenko said.

Ukraine’s top private power company DTEK said the power cuts impacted the capital as well as the Kyiv, Odesa, Dnipropetrovsk and Donetsk regions.

During the overnight missile attack on the western Rivne region, governor Oleksandr Koval said 280,000 consumers experienced power cuts. He also reported interruptions in water supply without elaborating on damage.

The mayor of the western town of Lutsk reported power cuts after several strikes, adding that the services were working to connect water and heating infrastructure to alternative power sources.

Kharkiv regional governor Oleh Syniehubov said a missile strike on the city damaged a business facility and windows in an apartment building.

The missile attack on the northeastern Sumy region targeted infrastructure, regional authorities said. Debris in Kyiv fell on the grounds of a business and dealt minor damage to several buildings and a truck, the Kyiv city military administration said.

Russia has repeatedly targeted Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, particularly during the winter months of the almost three-year-long war, which have triggered long power cuts for ordinary civilians.

Russia has issued a warning to the United States to halt what it called a “spiral of escalation” over Ukraine – but said it would keep informing Washington about test missile launches in order to avoid “dangerous mistakes”.

Speaking just days after Russia lowered its doctrinal threshold for the use of nuclear weapons and launched what it described as a new intermediate-range hypersonic ballistic missile against Ukraine, deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov said: “The signal is very clear and obvious – stop.

“You should not do this any more, you mustn’t supply Kyiv with everything they want, don’t encourage them towards new military adventures, they are too dangerous,” Russian state media quoted Mr Ryabkov as saying.

“The current [US] administration must stop this spiral of escalation,” Mr Ryabkov added. “They simply must, otherwise the situation will become too dangerous for everyone, including the United States itself.”

Russia’s air defence systems destroyed 25 Ukrainian drones overnight over four regions, its defence ministry said this morning.

Of these, 14 drones were destroyed over the Krasnodar region, six over the Bryansk region, three over Moscow-annexed Crimea and two over the Rostov region, it said.

Krasnodar’s regional governor, Veniamin Kondratyev, wrote on Telegram that two districts in the southern Russian region were subjected to a “massive drone attack” overnight. One civilian was injured, he said.

A local Telegram channel published footage showing an object crashing into a building in the town of Slavyansk-na-Kubani, followed by a loud boom and fireball.

In the summer of 2015, three Syrian girls who had narrowly survived an airstrike some weeks earlier stood before Tulsi Gabbard with horrific burns all over their bodies.

Gabbard, then a US congresswoman on a visit to the Syria-Turkey border as part of her duties for the foreign affairs committee, had a question for them.

“How do you know it was Bashar al-Assad or Russia that bombed you, and not Isis?’” she asked, according to Mouaz Moustafa, a Syrian activist who was translating her conversation with the girls.

Richard Hall and Andrew Feinberg write:

A senior Russian official has said any peace deal on the war in Ukraine will have to be made on Vladimir Putin’s terms, the latest display of bravado from the Kremlin amid strong Russian territorial gains in the Donbas.

Peace in Ukraine can be negotiated if the United States and the West recognise that there are no alternatives to Russian president Vladimir Putin’s offer, Russian deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov said today, according to the state-run RIA news agency.

Mr Putin’s offer is the only option to end the war, he said.

His remarks comes a day after Ukraine’s former foreign minister said Vladimir Putin will not accept a peace deal pushed by US president-elect Donald Trump, because the Russian president is “obsessed” with “crushing” Ukraine and exposing the weakness of the West.

Russian authorities on Tuesday ordered a British diplomat to leave the country on allegations of spying as tensions soar over the conflict in Ukraine.

Russia’s Federal Security Service, the top domestic security and counterintelligence agency, said in a statement carried by Russian news agencies that the diplomat, identified as Edward Pryor Wilkes, had provided false personal data while seeking permission to enter the country.

The agency, known under its Russian acronym FSB, alleged that he has worked for British intelligence under diplomatic cover, replacing one of the six British diplomats who were expelled from Russia in August. The FSB alleged that Wilkes was involved in “intelligence and subversive activities that threatened the security of the Russian Federation.”

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Russia has targeted energy infrastructure in several Ukrainian cities in a “massive” overnight attack using cruise missiles, Ukrainian officials said this morning.

Explosions were heard in the cities of Odesa, Kropyvnytskyi, Kharkiv, Rivne and Lutsk this morning, Ukrainian news outlets Zerkalo Tyzhnya and Suspilne said.

“Energy infrastructure is once again targeted by the enemy’s massive strike,” Ukrainian energy minister Herman Halushchenko said on Facebook.

“The enemy continues to attack Kharkiv with missiles,” that city’s mayor Ihor Terekhov wrote on the Telegram channel. Odesa regional governor Oleh Kiper urged residents to stay in shelter in a separate message.

In the shattered Ukrainian city of Avdiivka, which Russian forces took in February this year, some of the few residents left said they were trying to rebuild their lives, though the scars of war – and the tears they provoke – remain.

Reuters footage, some of the first visuals by an international media organisation, showed destroyed buildings and vast amounts of rubble dusted with snow. Abandoned family pictures and clothes littered ruined apartments.

In a newly renovated apartment building in the city, Florida Troshina, a Russian-speaking Ukrainian, wept over the death of her daughter, killed just two days before Russian troops arrived.

Others told of the deprivations of living in a ruined city, which is known as Avdeyevka by Russian speakers.

“I just wanted to get out of the basement,” Tatiana Golovina said in Russian, adding that she was pleased to be moving back above ground.

“It is hard there. There is no light, the lighting is bad, we have battery-powered lamps there – at least it is warm here,” Golovina said.

Avdiivka, once a city of more than 37,000, was largely abandoned during the fighting though some residents endured the war and stayed.

“I think, starting from next year we will have the opportunity to approach in detail how and at what pace, what Avdiivka will look like in a post-military period, how it will be linked to the development of Donetsk,” said Denis Pushilin, the Russian-installed head of the surrounding Donetsk region.

Any decision by Donald Trump’s incoming administration to cut support for Ukraine would be a “death sentence” for the Ukrainian army, Russia’s deputy UN ambassador said.

“Even if we’re to lay to one side the prediction that Donald Trump will cut assistance to Ukraine, which for the Ukrainian army would essentially be a death sentence, it is becoming clearer that he and his team will, in any case, conduct an audit of the assistance provided to Kyiv,” said Dmitry Polyanskiy, the deputy UN envoy said, speaking at the UN security council.

Mr Polyanskiy said Volodymyr Zelensky was terrified of the return of Trump in January, and had reason to be so.

He also accused the outgoing Biden administration of trying through its increased support to Ukraine to create a “mess, both in Russia and with the new team in the White House.”

Europe is no longer in a “pre-war situation” with Russia, but “an actual war”, the former head of MI6 said.

“I think we have to face up to the fact that the Russians think they’re in a state of war with us,” Sir Richard Dearlove told tonight’s Politics Hub with Sophy Ridge as he disagreed with Polish prime minister Donald Tusk’s remarks of Europe being in a pre-war era.

“Donald Tusk has referred to it as a pre-war situation. I think he’s wrong. I think it’s an actual war. We’ve seen already quite clearly some very aggressive moves on the part of the Russians in various European countries,” he told Sky News.

The UK should be on alert for possible acts of sabotage, he warned.