Russian air attacks killed at least six people in Ukraine and left hundreds of thousands without electricity on Wednesday, days after US President Donald Trump announced an “energy ceasefire” in the war that has lasted more than four years, TRT World reported.
Russia’s Defence Ministry said, according to the Interfax news agency, that its forces had carried out a “massive” strike on Ukrainian communications and energy infrastructure.
President Volodymyr Zelensky said the ballistic missile attack on Kyiv came without warning from Ukraine’s Western partners, and accused Moscow of breaching the truce Trump announced on Sunday.
The ministry said it hit two plants supplying power and heating in Kyiv, two other plants in the wider region and an electricity substation.
Other targets included a heating and power plant in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, and a thermal power facility that it said supplied the Ukrainian military in the southeast of the Kharkiv region.
Moscow also said it struck a data centre in Kyiv that it said was used to gather intelligence on Russia’s military.
Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko urged residents to remain in shelters, saying energy facilities in Kyiv and the surrounding region had come under a massive ballistic missile strike.
“There are power disruptions in the capital,” he wrote on Telegram.
DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy provider, said the attack caused emergency power cuts in several urban districts of Kyiv.
Ukraine’s state emergency service said a Russian strike on a multistorey building in the capital’s Desnianskyi district killed two people, while another attack in Golosiivsky district killed one.
The Ukrainian military reported two people killed and six wounded in Russian attacks on the Dnipropetrovsk region, and another person killed in the southeastern Zaporizhzhia region.
Further missile attacks were reported in the Kharkiv and Zhytomyr regions, while strikes also hit Sumy and Chernihiv.
Al Jazeera’s Audrey MacAlpine, reporting from Kyiv, said a record number of hypersonic missiles were used against the capital and that more than half a million people in Ukraine were without power.
Zelensky said Ukraine detected the missiles only as they neared Kyiv, raising questions about intelligence sharing.
“Once again, no early warning from our partners,” he wrote on Facebook, calling it “absolutely unjust” that Ukraine was not even receiving early warnings of ballistic missile launches while its infrastructure was being destroyed.
In a post on X, he said the strike was a targeted ballistic missile attack on the very energy infrastructure covered by the ceasefire, “entirely deliberate and demonstrative in its scale”.
Russia had never before shown such “ostentatious disrespect towards the United States”, he added.
Sergiy Beskrestnov, a technology adviser to the Ukrainian president, said the operation of some Starlink internet terminals appeared to have been restricted overnight, preventing the military-grade version from working above 160 kilometres per hour and disrupting combat missions.
“Tonight SpaceX introduced a speed limit for the Starlink terminals in motion,” he said, referring to Elon Musk’s company.
Ukraine’s defence forces were not warned, he added, saying the move “cannot be a coincidence and is linked to the current political situation”.
Russia reported Ukrainian drone strikes overnight. Saratov region governor Roman Busargin said a drone attack killed one person in the city of Balakovo, adding that all infrastructure facilities were operating as usual.
Balakovo is home to a data centre of Sberbank, Russia’s top lender, a nuclear power plant and a hydropower station whose dam spans the Volga River.
Sberbank later said drones had attacked its data centre in the Saratov region but all systems were operating normally.
Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin said air defences downed nearly 500 drones flying towards the Russian capital overnight.
Russian authorities said about 160 more were brought down over the Rostov region.
The military later put the number of Ukrainian drones downed overnight at 902, of which 180 were near Moscow.
