More civilians died across Ukraine yesterday as analysts warned that delays in US military assistance would see Kyiv struggle to fight off Russian offensives.
One man was yesterday killed after a Russian drone hit the truck he was driving in the Sumy region, the local prosecutor’s office said. Elsewhere, a 67-year-old woman was killed after shelling hit an apartment block in the Donetsk region, said Governor Vadym Filashkin.
Officials in the Kharkiv region also said that they had retrieved the bodies of a 61-year-old woman and a 68-year-old man killed by a Russian strike the previous day. Ten Russian Shahed-type drones were shot down over the Kharkiv region overnight, the Ukrainian Air Force said yesterday.
A Russia-installed official in Ukraine’s southern Zaporizhzhia region said that the death toll from shelling by Ukraine’s military on the town of Tokmak had risen to 16 people.
Yevgeny Balitsky, the top Moscow-installed official in the region, said on the Telegram messaging app that 20 people had been wounded in the shelling on Friday night, with 12 in serious condition.
Zaporizhzhia is one of four Ukrainian regions that have been partially occupied by Russian forces and which Moscow moved to annex after launching its full-scale invasion on Ukraine in February 2022.
Meanwhile, shelling in the Russian-occupied Kherson region killed two civilians yesterday, said Moscow-installed leader Vladimir Saldo. Ukrainian drones were also reported in Russia’s Krasnodar and Belgorod regions and over the Black Sea, the Russian defence ministry said.
The news came as the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, warned that delays in Western military assistance would increasingly hamper Ukraine’s ability to push back Russian advances.
With the war in Ukraine entering its third year and a vital US aid package for Kyiv stuck in Congress, Russia has used its edge in firepower and personnel to step up attacks across eastern Ukraine. It has increasingly used satellite-guided gliding bombs – dropped from planes from a safe distance – to pummel Ukrainian forces beset by a shortage of troops and ammunition.
In its report, the ISW said that Russian forces were prioritising grinding, tactical gains with operational-level efforts focusing on the cities of Lyman, Chasiv Yar and Pokrovsk.
“The Russian military command likely assesses that Ukrainian forces will be unable to defend against current and future Russian offensive operations due to delays in or the permanent end of U.S. military assistance,” the think tank said.
For the past two winters, Ukraine has withstood a barrage of Russian air strikes seeking to disable its energy infrastructure, plunge its citizens into darkness and use the freezing temperatures as a weapon of war.
Ukraine survived the assault thanks to Western air defence systems and energy-saving measures taken by its citizens, as families cooked on camping stoves and doctors performed surgery by flashlight.
While Ukraine weathered this winter’s storm, Russia has renewed its onslaught in recent weeks, striking Ukraine’s power grid with an intensity and in a manner not seen during more than two years of war.
“Their tactics have changed – unfortunately, not for the better for us,” Svitlana Grynchuk, Ukraine’s deputy energy minister, told CNN.
In the first two years of war, Russian attacks were more scattered, firing salvos of missiles to target large swathes of Ukraine’s energy system. Now, the strikes are becoming more precise and concentrated, with dozens of missiles and drones raining down on a single target.
“In such a short period of time – in a few weeks of these massive Russian attacks – almost all of our year-long efforts to rebuild and repair were destroyed in a few days, in a few attacks,” Grynchuk said.
The turning point came in late March, Oleksandr Kharchenko, director of the Kyiv-based Energy Industry Research Center (EIRC), said. On that day, Russia launched one of its largest missile and drone attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, targeting at least 10 of the country’s regions and briefly leaving more than one million households without electricity.
“On March 22, Russia began to implement its new strategy of attacks,” Kharchenko said. “The new strategy consists of massive missile attacks on specific targets, when a large number of missiles and drones simultaneously focus on a very limited number of targets.”
Russia has since pummelled Ukrainian power stations across the country, and on Thursday completely destroyed the Trypilska Thermal Power Plant – the largest plant in the Kyiv region. DTEK, Ukraine’s biggest private power company, also said on Thursday that Russia had caused “serious damage” to two of its plants, and that approximately 80 per cent of the power-generating facilities it runs had been destroyed by Russian strikes.
“Rather than continuing to focus their attacks on Ukraine’s transmission systems, from late March Russia began launching massive attacks on our energy generation infrastructure,” Maxim Timchenko, CEO of DTEK, told CNN. “Unfortunately, the enemy has evolved his tactics and is using high-precision weapons. The result is a huge increase in its destructive effectiveness compared to 2023.”
Given Ukraine keeps energy in storage, the strikes on thermal power plants have not caused immediate, prolonged blackouts. Thermal plants are mostly used to balance overall need – particularly during intense heating periods in winter when consumption spikes.
As well as the intensity and concentration of the attacks, their timing has also changed. Previously, the bulk of Russia’s strikes came in the buildup to winter. Now, they have come in an unusually warm spring.