TALKS? While the US is pushing for negotiations to end the war by summer, Ukrainian officials said that ‘every strike is a blow to peace efforts,’ urging pressure
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Reuters
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Nearly 300,000 people were left without electricity and water supply in Ukraine’s southern city of Odesa after a Russian attack, Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Oleksiy Kuleba said yesterday.
He added that close to 200 buildings in the city were left without heating, while 10,000 consumers were also left without heating in the southeastern city of Dnipro.
Russia pounded Ukraine with drones and ballistic missiles overnight, targeting energy systems and injuring at least seven people in the capital, Kyiv, and the cities of Dnipro and Odesa, officials said.
A resident removes glass from a broken window of her balcony damaged during overnight Russian drone and missile strikes in Kyiv yesterday.
Photo: Reuters
“Hundreds of drones and ballistic missiles targeted energy systems, depriving people of power, heating, and water,” Ukrainian Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrii Sybiha wrote on social media.
Ukraine’s major private energy company DTEK said that Russia attacked its thermal power plant overnight, causing significant damage to the plant’s equipment.
“This is the 11th massive attack on the company’s thermal power plants since October 2025,” DTEK said on the Telegram messenger, giving no more details.
Two people were hurt in a “massive” attack on Kyiv, which also hit various buildings, city Mayor Vitali Klitschko said.
Klitschko said on Telegram that there had been hits on both residential and non-residential buildings on both sides of the Dnipro River bisecting the city.
Fragments had fallen near two residential buildings in one district, but no fire had broken out.
Reuters witnesses heard explosions resound in the city.
Four people, including a baby boy and a four-year-old girl, were hurt in a missile and drone attack on the southeastern city of Dnipro and surrounding district, regional governor Oleksandr Ganzha said on Telegram.
One person was hurt in a drone attack on Odesa on the Black Sea, which also damaged an infrastructure facility and an apartment building where a fire broke out at an upper floor, said Serhiy Lysak, head of the city’s military administration.
Lysak also said that a fire engulfed pavilions at one of the city’s markets and damaged a supermarket building.
Regional Governor Oleh Kiper said that energy infrastructure was damaged in Odesa district.
“Each such strike is a blow to peace efforts aimed at ending the war. Russia must be forced to take diplomacy seriously and de-escalate,” Sybiha said.
Ukrainian officials have met Russian officials under US mediation in Abu Dhabi in the latest US push to end the war.
The talks so far have failed to resolve differences over Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, sources say, and Russia has pressed on with attacks often focused on Ukrainian energy facilities in the depths of a harsh winter.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Wednesday said the US needed to put more pressure on Russia if it wanted the war to end by summer.
