New Russian Barrage Targets Ukraine Infrastructure

Russian airstrikes inflicted more damage on Ukraine on Thursday, with the latest barrage smashing into energy infrastructure, apartment buildings, and an industrial site. At least four people were killed and more than a dozen others wounded in drone and missile strikes around the country, authorities said. In Kyiv, the city’s military administration said air defenses shot down at least two cruise missiles and five Iranian-made exploding drones, the AP reports. With the Kremlin’s forces on the ground being pushed back, Russia has increasingly resorted in recent weeks to aerial onslaughts aimed at energy infrastructure and other civilian targets in parts of Ukraine it doesn’t hold.

Ukrainian air defenses this week appear to have had far higher rates of successful shoot-downs than during previous barrages last month, analysts say. The improvement results in part from Western-supplied air defense systems. But some missiles and drones still get through. The Russian strikes hit Dnipro and Ukraine’s southern Odesa region for the first time in weeks. Thursday's blasts followed the huge barrage of Russian strikes on Tuesday. That was the biggest attack to date on Ukraine's energy infrastructure that also resulted in a missile hitting Poland. Russia has increasingly targeted Ukraine’s power grid as winter approaches. The most recent barrage followed days of euphoria in Ukraine sparked by one of its biggest military successes—the retaking last week of the southern city of Kherson.

The head of Ukraine’s presidential office, Andriy Yermak, called the strikes on energy targets “naive tactics of cowardly losers” in a Telegram post on Thursday. In Kherson, authorities say they have found 63 bodies bearing signs of torture. Investigators say the Russian occupiers rounded up people who had protested the invasion and those with links to the Ukrainian military, the BBC reports. Authorities say four illegal prisons and 11 torture chambers have been found so far, and the investigation is still in its early stages. More than 700 people are missing. (NATO says the missile that killed two people in Poland was probably a stray Ukrainian air defense missile.)