Ukraine Reports Major Russian Attack on Its Energy Sector

President Vladimir V. Putin said Russia has been selecting targets for missile strikes in Kyiv and that they might include “decision-making centers.”

Russia launched a major missile attack, backed by drones, on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure on Thursday, leaving millions of people without power, Ukrainian officials said.

The total extent of the damage was not immediately clear, but explosions were heard in cities across the country, and many officials reported power outages.

“The energy sector is under massive enemy attack again,” Ukraine’s energy minister, Herman Halushchenko, wrote on his Facebook page. The operator of the Ukrainian transmission system “has urgently introduced emergency power outages,” Mr. Halushchenko wrote.

In the western regions of Lviv, Volyn and Rivne, more than a million people were without power, officials said. Further to the east, the city of Zhytomyr in central Ukraine was without power and water. The southern city of Kherson was also without power, as was much of Kyiv, the capital.

Ihor Polishchuk, the mayor of Lutsk in the Volyn region of western Ukraine, said there had been several hits on his city and the surrounding area. Six people were reported injured across Ukraine, according to the regional authorities.

Russia has attacked cities in Ukraine with drones almost every night since September in a campaign that analysts say is intended to test and wear down air defenses, and it has recently stepped up missile attacks.

The attacks have also targeted Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in an effort to plunge the population into cold and darkness as winter sets in.

Ukraine’s Air Force reported that 91 missiles and 97 drones were fired at the country overnight. It said that 79 missiles were downed, and all of the drones were either downed or jammed. All told, 188 strikes were aimed at Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, the air force said.

Cruise and ballistic missiles were launched from planes that took off from airfields in three Russian regions and Crimea, the air force said. The Black Sea fleet at Novorossiysk also contributed to the attack with Kaliber cruise missiles.

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia said Thursday that his country has been selecting targets for missile strikes in Kyiv and that they might include “decision-making centers” in the Ukrainian capital.

“At present, the Ministry of Defense and the General Staff are selecting targets to hit on Ukrainian territory,” Mr. Putin said in Kazakhstan at a meeting of a Moscow-led security alliance. “These could be military facilities, defense and industrial enterprises, or decision-making centers in Kyiv.”

Mr. Putin said that Russia will respond with force to strikes on its territory with the use of long-range Western-made missiles.

The assaults Thursday represented the 11th major attack on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure this year, the Ukrainian energy ministry said.

More than 40 percent of the country’s generating capacity had already been destroyed and occupied before the attacks Thursday, according to Stanislav Ignatiev, executive director of Ukraine’s Institute of Sustainable Development, a nongovernmental organization.

The damage and destruction of Ukraine’s power generating capacity means that the country will face energy problems for a while, analysts said.

“Unfortunately, we have to state that in the near future, we will be limited in generating capacity for at least three to four years until we build new ones,” Oleksandr Kharchenko, director of the Energy Research Center, an independent institute, said on Nov. 25.

Yurii Shyvala, Anastasia Kuznietsova and Ivan Nechepurenko contributed reporting.

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