Ben Wallace seeks rockets in US as Ukraine power plants targeted

Ben Wallace, the defence secretary, made an urgent trip to Washington yesterday to hold talks with his US counterpart after Russia unleashed exploding drones on Kyiv.

Nearly a third of Ukraine’s power stations have been destroyed in the past week, President Zelensky said yesterday, warning his people of a tough winter ahead as Moscow shifted its war strategy to bombing infrastructure.

Wallace and Lloyd Austin, the US secretary of defence, discussed the “support to Ukraine by our two nations”, Brigadier General Patrick Ryder, the Pentagon spokesman, said. After the meeting it was announced that the West would send more rockets to Ukraine to defend against the Iranian drones unleashed by Russia.

In a tweet Zelensky decried “another kind of Russian terrorist attack” after missiles struck plants, relay stations and waterworks across the country, including in Kyiv, a day after it was hit by Iranian explosive drones. More than 1,100 villages and towns lost power. The president said 30 per cent of power sites had been destroyed since October 10.

Strikes against power supplies were recorded from the battle-scarred city of Kharkiv in the north to the port of Mykolaiv in the south. Facilities in Dnipro and Kyiv, both far from the front line, were also struck. Seeking to deprive Ukrainians of water, electricity and heating and the broadening use of the so-called kamikaze drones signal a new phase in the eight-month conflict.

In the past week alone, more than 100 drones have struck power and sewage plants, residential buildings, bridges and other urban targets, according to the Ukrainian foreign ministry. Five people died on Monday when a tenement in Kyiv was struck by a drone, across the road from a heating plant. Two more died yesterday in a strike on a power station in western Kyiv.

General Sergei Surovikin, the new commander of Russian forces, said last night that Ukraine was preparing a missile attack on a critical dam and vowed the “safe evacuation” of residents from the southern city of Kherson. He admitted the situation there is “difficult”.

The announcement was viewed in Kyiv as a pretext for a potential retreat and the forced relocation of civilians, more than a million of whom have been moved by Russia during the conflict. A western official said it was believed that Russia was “pursuing a deliberate strategy of attempting to destroy Ukraine’s electricity network”.

Jens Stoltenberg, the Nato secretary-general, said the alliance would deliver new air defence systems to Ukraine in the coming days to help the country to fend off the Iranian-made drones that were attacking critical infrastructure.

Earlier, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, deputy head of Zelensky’s office, warned of a “critical” threat to Ukraine’s power grid and water supplies. “It’s necessary for the country to prepare for electricity, water and heating outages,” he said.

Eight days of infrastructure attacks began on October 10 with more than 80 cruise missiles launched in a day on Ukraine’s cities in retaliation for the unclaimed strike on Russia’s Black Sea bridge to Crimea.

The Kerch bridge, finished in 2016, two years after Russia annexed the peninsula, was a key artery for the resupply of Russian forces in southern Ukraine as well as a symbol of Moscow’s control over the territory.

Russia admitted deliberately striking energy targets but claimed it was also hitting military targets with “high- precision air and sea-based weapons”.

It may only be a fraction of the size of Kyiv, but it was Zhytomyr that stepped forward to share its electricity when cruise missiles knocked out power in the capital last week. Yesterday it was Zhytomyr’s turn to feel the Kremlin’s wrath when two Russian missiles slammed into its only power station, in a graphic demonstration of Moscow’s campaign of reprisals across Ukraine.

Zhytomyr’s population of 260,000 emerged from basements and bomb shelters yesterday morning to discover a city without power or water, its hospitals running on emergency diesel-power generators as rescue workers rushed to the site of the attack.

Traffic lights fell black and trams stood still in their tracks. The autumn sunshine, at least, was golden. Zhytomyr had seen little of the war since its opening weeks, in February and March, when it came under sustained rocket fire that destroyed a school.

It was different then, Vitaly Bunechko, the head of the military administration said, when Russia still had salvos of munitions to fire at Ukraine and confidence in its victory. “There were rockets all the time, indiscriminately,” Bunechko said. “Now they are trying to save their missiles for our power supplies.”

Most of the power facilities Russia hit on the eighth day of its sustained assault on Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure were in its larger towns and cities.

They included Kyiv, where two people died in a missile strike on a power station on the west bank of the Dnipro River, and shellshocked Mykolaiv, close to the southern front near Kherson, where one man was killed in his home. Zhytomyr lies 90 miles west of Kyiv, linking it across the plains with western Ukraine, along an historic route running all the way to Warsaw. A transportation hub, it is also the town that lends Kyiv power should it lose it.

Yesterday the capital returned the favour. “Kyiv has agreed to lower its consumption to help Zhytomyr while we restore power,” Bunechko said, as engineers worked at the plant. “We understand that the Russians are trying out this new strategy. We have to keep ahead of what they are trying.”

Kyrylo Tymoshenko, the deputy head of President Zelensky’s office, warned that attacks even on such a small city as Zhytomyr could disrupt the larger network keeping the vast country powered. “The situation is critical across the country because our regions are dependent on one another,” he told Ukrainian television.

Diesel-powered generators were powered up to keep the Zhytomyr’s hospital’s running, including the maternity hospital where labour and newborn wards have been moved into a bomb-proof bunker.

Anastasia, 22, who came to Zhytomyr a week ago after fleeing the Russian-occupied city of Kherson, expressed resignation that the conflict had followed her. “Of course we understand what they are trying to do,” she said. “They want to demoralise people and break their spirit. We have to stay strong.”

Russia had been open about its deliberate campaign to strike Ukrainian infrastructure targets, just as President Putin boasted last month he could freeze Europe into submission by cutting Russian energy supplies. In Vladivostok last month, he said that “as in the famous Russian fairytale, we would sentence the wolf’s tail to be frozen”.

Pro-Russian Telegram channels, many of which turned gloomy during Ukraine’s northeastern offensive recapturing land in Kharkiv, erupted at news of the outages, goading Moscow to keep going until the entire grid was destroyed.

“Let’s hope that constant strikes on Ukraine will turn them into Eskimos!” one user gloated. “The light should disappear forever, not for just three hours,” another wrote, “or until the liberation of the city from the Nazis,” using the slur Putin had used to justify his invasion of Ukraine.

Another believed that the new strategy could turn the tide of the conflict after Russia’s failure to stop the Ukrainian advance in Kharkiv. “If it lasts until the weekend at least — the effect will be amazing!” they wrote. “And at the front, everything will turn in the opposite direction. It’s already there. And if you increase the blows on the weekend, they will float!”

Many of the same Telegram accounts have previously egged on Putin’s weaponisation of energy supplies to send prices rocketing in Europe. “We can help Europe save energy too,” one joked, echoing Putin’s threat to launch nuclear attacks on the West.

In Berlin, Jens Stoltenberg, the Nato secretary-general, pledged that within days the alliance would deliver new air defence systems, including ones to defend against the explosive drones that assaulted Kyiv on Monday. “The most important thing we can do is deliver on what allies have promised, to step up and deliver even more air defence systems,” Stoltenberg said.

Iran denies supplying Russia with the kamikaze drones but western intelligence officials believe it has delivered 2,500 and plans to supply Moscow with more advanced missile systems, despite the threat of more sanctions.

Many Ukrainians were surprised that Russia had not seriously targeted its infrastructure before. Power, water and telecommunications all held up even as Russia was attempting to capture Kyiv in February. Intelligence officials believe such networks were left intact because of Moscow’s mistaken belief it could simply topple Zelensky and take over the government.

The attacks on infrastructure follow the appointment of a notorious commander of Russian forces in Ukraine, General Sergei Surovikin, who conducted scorched-earth campaigns in Syria and Chechnya.

Russian-installed Kherson authorities said today they are planning to “relocate” about 50,000 to 60,000 people to the left bank of Dnipro River and regions of Russia over a period of six days.