Ukrainian firefighters tackle a massive blaze in the Black Sea port city of Odessa in the early hours of Thursday after the region was the target of a Russian aerial assault. Photo courtesy Ukrainian State Emergency Service/EPA
A Russian airborne assault against civilian targets in five Ukrainian provinces across the east and south of the country killed five people and injured 19, authorities said Thursday.
The Russian military carried out airstrikes, launched guided bombs and 112 Shahed-type attack and decoy drones overnight, with 22 of the UAVs making it past Ukrainian air defenses to reach targets in 12 locations from Kharkiv in the northeast to Odessa in the southwest.
The highest death toll was in the northeastern province of Sumy where three people were killed and two were injured over the past 24 hours.
Two people were killed and eight were injured in Kherson province in the south, while at least five people were injured in the Black Sea port region of Odessa after port, energy and civilian infrastructure were hit in strikes overnight.
Odessa Gov. Oleh Kiper said in an online post that a huge blaze was ignited at the port after containers of vegetable oil and wood pellets were set ablaze and 30,000 homes were left without power.
The power outage plunged the entire city of Chornomorsk, 18 miles southwest of Odessa, into darkness.
DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy provider, said its engineers were working to repair critical infrastructure facilities and connect residential buildings to backup lines “where technically possible.”
“The damage is significant. Repairs will take time,” the company said on its Telegram channel.
In Zaporizhzhia, two people were injured in air, drone and artillery strikes on 14 communities, according to Gov. Ivan Federov.
At least one person was injured in the frontline province of Kharkiv.
The attacks came amid an escalation in Russian strikes targeting Ukraine’s sources of heat ahead of the winter, with attacks overnight Tuesday taking out at least one thermal power plant as well as energy infrastructure in the Chernihiv, Kherson and Dnipropetrovsk regions.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian Special Operations Forces “deepstrike units” attacked energy production infrastructure almost 400 miles inside Russian territory overnight in Volgograd province, striking a major gas processing plant operated by Lukoil in the city of Kotovo.
The facility has the capacity to process 450 million tons of natural and petroleum gas a year.
The “linear production dispatch station” in nearby Yefimovka was also hit.
Explosions and fires occurred at both locations overnight, but the Ukrainian General Staff cautioned that the extent of the damage had yet to be verified.
