More fighting, more deaths and injuries among civilians, more raids that leave thousands of people freezing in the middle of winter. Two days after the massive attack which, according to local authorities, left as many as 6,000 buildings in Kiev without electricity, the mayor of the Ukrainian capital is launching a new alarm: he reports that the heating has not yet been restored in “more than a thousand”. And this while outside the thermometer shows freezing temperatures, well below zero.
The Kyiv Independent says that “the situation remains difficult” especially in areas of the city east of the Dnipro River, where “in the last 72 hours electricity has only been available for about five hours in total” and civil protection has set up tents on the street to allow people to keep warm, journalists on site say.
The infrastructure war and accusations of international violations
In these almost four years of war, the Russian army has targeted the Ukrainian electricity grid, leaving people without electricity, water and heating with incessant raids that the UN mission for monitoring human rights in Ukraine considers probable violations of international humanitarian law.
On Saturday, however, it was the Moscow authorities who accused Kiev’s troops of leaving “600,000 people” in the dark and without heating after a missile attack on the Russian region of Belgorod, on the border with Ukraine. While just two days earlier Kiev reported that, after a bombing by Russian soldiers, “over a million people” were left without electricity in south-eastern Ukraine, and in particular in the Dnipropetrovsk region.
Zelensky’s complaint and the civilian death toll
«They purposely waited for the frost to make the situation worse for our people», thunders Volodymyr Zelensky meanwhile, pointing the finger directly at the Kremlin and accusing the Russian invading troops of firing «at targets that have no military significance» such as “energy infrastructures” and “residential buildings”.
The attacks occur against the backdrop of difficult peace negotiations and a conflict that unfortunately knows no respite. Kiev continues to report civilian casualties, mostly in the east of the country: four dead and ten injured in the Donetsk region, one dead and two injured in the Zaporizhzhia region, and two more injured in the Kherson region and eight in the Kharkiv region. While on the other side of the border, the Russian authorities accuse the Ukrainian armed forces of having struck the city of Voronezh with drones, killing a woman and injuring three other civilians.
Evolution of the front and attacks on energy resources
On the front, the Russian army claims to have taken control of another small town in south-eastern Ukraine: Bilohiria, in the Zaporizhzhia region. While Kiev says it continues to target Russian oil infrastructure and claims to have hit three Russian Lukoil drilling platforms in the Caspian Sea.