EIGHT KILLED IN ODESA
The Russian defence ministry, which has been making rapid gains in Donetsk over recent weeks, said it had claimed another village, Novooleksiyivka, in the region where Ukrainian defensive lines have been buckling under Russian pressure.
The advances came one day after Russia’s latest large-scale drone and missile attack targeting Ukrainian energy facilities across the country.
A new strike on the port city of Odesa killed at least eight people and wounded another 18, the regional governor, Oleg Kiper, wrote on social media.
The national grid operator Ukrenergo and Ukraine’s largest private energy company DTEK said that engineers were still repairing damaged facilities in the southern Odesa region following the missile and drone barrage.
DTEK said 400,000 families in several regions had been reconnected but some 321,000 subscribers in the Odesa region were still without power and others in the Black Sea region did not have heating or water supplies.
Yermak said that the fresh attack on Monday showed that “Russian killers no longer even hide their intentions”, as details of the impact of the strike were still emerging.
Ukrenergo also said it had stepped up electricity imports from neighbouring European countries to make up for the the shortfall after the Russian broadside.
The weekend attack, which officials said was one of Moscow’s largest since it invaded in early 2022, came just ahead of the 1,000th day of the war which will be marked at the United Nations on Monday and attended by Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andriy Sybiga.
