(Reuters) -A Ukrainian drone attack late on Tuesday knocked out power to areas of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia region under Russian control, the Moscow-installed governor said.
Russian forces hold well over half of Zaporizhzhia region in Ukraine’s southeast. But Kyiv maintains control of the region’s main administrative centre and its attacks have periodically knocked out electricity in Russian-held areas.
Russia in 2022 annexed the Zaporizhzhia region, along with neighbouring Kherson as well as Donetsk and Luhansk in Ukraine’s east, about seven months after invading its smaller neighbour.
“The reason for the power cuts in Zaporizhzhia region is yet another enemy terrorist drone attack on high-voltage equipment,” Moscow-appointed Governor Yevgeny Balitsky wrote on the Telegram messaging app.
Balitsky said repair crews were restoring power and switching affected areas to reserve lines. He said the work was made more difficult “by the danger of repeat strikes and by darkness”.
Ukrainian shelling and drone attacks knocked out power in June for more than 24 hours to at least 700,000 residents across the area. That attack appeared to be the largest of its kind on Russian-held territory since the war began.
The Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station, Europe’s largest with six reactors, was operating as normal, unaffected by the power cuts, the plant’s director of communications, Yevgenia Yashina, told Russia’s RIA news agency.
The plant produces no electricity but needs power for cooling and monitoring systems to maintain safety. Ukraine and Russia regularly accuse each other of staging attacks on the plant, seized by Russian forces in the first weeks of the February 2022 invasion.
In the part of Kherson region under Ukrainian control, Governor Vyacheslav Prokudin said in a Telegram post that Russian shelling killed a resident of a small town north of the regional capital.
And the governor of Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region, to the north, Serhiy Lysak, also said on Telegram that Russian shelling killed a resident of Nikopol, a frequent target of Moscow’s attacks on the north bank of the Dnipro River.
(Reporting by Ron Popeski; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
