FLASH
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A massive Russian drone and missile attack has hit gas facilities in eastern Ukraine, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy flew to Washington for a meeting with Donald Trump to discuss the US supply of Tomahawk cruise missiles to Kiev.
Russia launched hundreds of drones, dozens of missiles, and cruise missiles early Thursday, causing outages in eight regions in another large-scale bombardment targeting Ukraine's energy grid.
“Russia launched more than 300 attack drones and 37 missiles, a significant number of them ballistic, against Ukraine,” Zelenskyy said in X. “This fall, the Russians are using every single day to strike our energy infrastructure.”
Zelenskyy said the attacks had hit the regions of Chernihiv, Kharkiv, Poltava, Sumy and Vinnytsia.
Since invading Ukraine in 2022, Moscow has attacked Ukrainian energy infrastructure every winter, forcing Kiev to impose emergency blackouts and import energy from abroad.
Commenting on the attacks, the Russian defense ministry claimed it had struck facilities used by the Ukrainian military with Kinzhal missiles "in response" to attacks on Russian infrastructure, an apparent reference to attacks on refineries in Russia.
Sergii Koretskyi, the executive director of Ukrainian gas company Naftogaz, said: "There are strikes and destruction in several regions at the same time. The operation of a number of critical facilities has stopped."
The Ukrainian power grid operator announced emergency power outages in eight regions following Thursday's attacks.
The Ukrainian air force said the Russian barrage consisted of 320 drones and 37 missiles, adding that 283 drones and five missiles were shot down.
She said the attacks mainly targeted the Kharkiv region in the north and the eastern Poltava region, where the country's largest private energy provider, DTEK, said a gas production facility had been shut down.
Media reports previously suggested that around 60% of Ukrainian gas production had been halted in the recent Russian attacks, and attacks on power plants had cut off electricity supplies to hundreds of thousands of people in Ukraine.
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