KYIV: Russian missiles and drones struck nearly a dozen Ukrainian energy infrastructure facilities on Wednesday, causing serious damage at three Soviet-era thermal power plants and blackouts in multiple regions, officials said.
Ukraine’s air force said it shot down 39 of 55 missiles and 20 of 21 attack drones used for the attack, which piles more pressure on the energy system more than two years after Russia launched its full-scale invasion.
“Another massive attack on our energy industry!” Energy Minister German Galushchenko wrote on the Telegram app.
Two people were injured in the Kyiv region and one was hurt in the Kirovohrad region, Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said.
Galushchenko said power generation and transmission facilities in the Poltava, Kirovohrad, Zaporizhzhia, Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk and Vinnytsia regions were targeted.
Some 350 rescuers raced to minimize the damage to energy facilities, 30 homes, public transport vehicles, cars, and a fire station, the interior ministry said.
National power grid operator Ukrenergo said it was forced to introduce electricity cuts in nine regions for consumers and that it would expand them nationwide for businesses during peak evening hours until 11 p.m. (2000 GMT).
Ukrenergo CEO Volodymyr Kudrytskyi, interviewed by the Ukrainska Pravda media outlet, said electricity imports would not make up for power shortages. He said hydropower stations had also been hit, clarifying an earlier company statement omitting hydro stations from the list of affected facilities.
Power cuts for industrial users, he said, were “almost guaranteed” but interruptions for domestic users would depend on how well they reduced consumption.
“Many important power stations were damaged,” he said, citing three stations operated by DTEK, Ukraine’s biggest private company, as well as two hydropower stations.
“The damage is on quite a large scale. There is a significant loss of generating power, so significant that even imports of power from Europe will not cover the shortage that has been created in the energy system.”
Russia’s defense ministry said it struck Ukraine’s military-industrial complex and energy facilities in retaliation for Kyiv’s strikes on Russian energy facilities.
“As a result of the strike, Ukraine’s capabilities for the output of military products, as well as the transfer of Western weapons and military equipment to the line of contact, have been significantly reduced,” the ministry said.

WORLD WAR TWO ANNIVERSARY
President Volodymyr Zelensky noted the attacks were launched on the day Ukraine marks the end of World War Two.
“This is how the Kremlin marks the end of World War Two in Europe, with a massive strike, attempting to disrupt the lives of our people with its Nazism,” he said in his nightly video address.
In an earlier online address, Zelensky singled out what he said was the West’s limited progress in curbing Russian energy revenue and some countries that attended President Vladimir Putin’s inauguration for a fifth term in the Kremlin on Tuesday.
Fighting Nazism back then, he said, was “when humanity unites, opposes Hitler, instead of buying his oil and coming to his inauguration.”
Ukraine has stepped up drone attacks on Russian refineries this year despite apparent objections by the United States, trying to find a pressure point against the Kremlin whose forces are slowly advancing in the eastern Donbas region.
Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries may have disrupted more than 15 percent of Russian oil refining capacity, a NATO military alliance official has said.
After pounding the energy system in the first winter of the war, Russia renewed its assault on the grid in March as Ukraine was running low on stocks of Western air defense missiles.
Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal estimated that more than 800 heating facilities had been damaged and up to 8 GW of power generation lost so far, adding the government needed $1 billion to fund repair work.
DTEK vowed to keep working to restore power at its facilities, and its CEO, Maxim Timchenko, called on Ukraine’s allies to provide more air defense systems.
Officials did not name the facilities hit on Wednesday, part of a policy of wartime secrecy that Kyiv says is needed to prevent Russia using the information for further strikes.
But Lviv governor Maksym Kozytskyi said Russia attacked a natural gas storage facility in his region in the west of the country, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported.
In central Poltava region, energy infrastructure was hit by a drone, Poltava Regional Governor Filip Pronin said.
The governors of Vinnytsia and Zaporizhzhia said critical civilian infrastructure facilities were damaged.

ALBUQUERQUE, US: New Mexico state’s top prosecutor announced charges Wednesday against three men who are accused of using Meta’s social media platforms to target and solicit sex with underage children.

The arrests are the result of a monthslong undercover operation in which the suspects connected with decoy accounts that were set up by the state Department of Justice. The investigation began in December around the time the state filed a civil lawsuit against the social media giant, claiming Meta was failing to take basic precautionary measures to ensure children were safe on its platforms.
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said during a news conference Wednesday that the suspects communicated and exchanged explicit sexual content through Facebook’s messenger app and were clear in expressing a sexual interest in children.
“It’s extraordinarily concerning to us just how easily these individuals found the undercover personas that were created,” Torrez said. “And it is, frankly, I think a wakeup call for all of us to understand just how serious these kinds of threats are.”
He placed blame on Meta executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and suggested that the company was putting profits above the interests of parents and children.
“For those of us who are engaged in this work, we are simply tired of the rhetoric,” he said. “We are tired of the assurances that have been given to members of our communities, to members of Congress, to policymakers that all reasonable steps have been taken to ensure that this type of behavior doesn’t occur.”
Meta disputed the allegations and reiterated Wednesday that it uses technology to prevent suspicious adults from finding or interacting with children and teens on its apps and that it works with law enforcement in investigating and prosecuting offenders.
The company also said it has hired child safety experts, reports content to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and shares information and tools with others to help root out predators.
“This is an ongoing fight, where determined criminals evolve their tactics across platforms to try and evade protections,” Meta said in an emailed statement.
While the state attorney general’s office will continue working to identify predators who are targeting children, Torrez said it’s too early to say whether that work will have a bearing on the civil litigation.
As part of that lawsuit, New Mexico prosecutors say they have uncovered internal documents in which Meta employees estimate about 100,000 children every day are subjected to sexual harassment on the company’s platforms.
The three defendants in the criminal case were identified as Fernando Clyde, Marlon Kellywood and Christopher Reynolds. Prosecutors are seeking to detain them pending trial on charges that include child solicitation by an electronic communication device.
Hearings have yet to be scheduled, and court records did not list attorneys who could speak on behalf of Clyde and Kellywood. A message was left with the public defender’s office, which is representing Reynolds.