KYIV — Russia launched a massive missile and drone attack on Ukrainian cities early Friday that destroyed energy infrastructure, caused power blackouts in different regions and killed several people — highlighting the country’s urgent need for stronger air defenses outside Kyiv.
The strikes, which hit Ukraine’s largest hydroelectric power plant in the southeastern city of Zaporizhzhia, amounted to “the largest attack on the Ukrainian energy sector in recent times,” Ukrainian Energy Minister German Galushchenko said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Friday the strikes showed that Zaporizhzhia and Kharkiv, in the northeast, urgently need Patriot air defense systems to protect infrastructure and civilians as Ukraine waits for more Western aid, including $60 billion blocked in Congress by House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.).
Ukraine has long requested more air defense to protect major cities from such attacks. Defending Kharkiv — just 19 miles from the Russian border — is especially complicated because missiles can travel so quickly from inside Russia that even advanced air defense systems would struggle to respond in time.
“There are no delays in Russian missiles, as in aid packages to our state,” Zelensky said. “Shaheds do not have indecision, like some politicians,” he continued, referring to the Iranian drones that Russia regularly launches at Ukraine. “It is important to understand the cost of delays and delayed decisions.”
Adrienne Watson, spokeswoman for the White House National Security Council, condemned the strikes Friday and said the United States must “provide Ukraine more air defenses to defend against these attacks.”
“Lives are on the line,” Watson wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “House Republicans must pass the national security supplemental ASAP.”
Early Friday, 15 blasts were heard in Kharkiv, and power and water supplies were cut off, Mayor Ihor Terekhov said. The strike left the city in a total blackout — meaning even the siren system that warns residents about incoming air attacks was not functioning. Instead, air raid alarms would be sent directly to mobile devices. Police and other emergency officials would also walk the streets with loudspeakers to announce any alarms, officials said.
By Friday evening, the power was still out in Kharkiv, officials said.
Traffic lights and emergency service phones were also not working, although new numbers have been shared for civilians in need of assistance, officials said. The strikes in Zaporizhzhia also struck a trolley bus.
“Even last winter, the attacks on our energy system were not as big as last night,” Volodymyr Kudrytskyi, the chief executive of Ukrenergo, the state energy supplier, told Ukrainian news outlet Radio Svoboda.
Mariia Tsaturian, chief communications officer at Ukrenergo, said that the company’s ultra high voltage substations “were damaged today, some of them severely.”
After severe attacks on their infrastructure last year, Ukrenergo bulked up its security protocols and protection of its facilities, Tsaturian said in a phone interview. Such measures saved lives Friday, she said, because employees are aware that power facilities are a key target and “know what to do during the air raid alert.”
The attack caused power outages in the Dnipropetrovsk region, where 1,060 miners were working underground at coal mining facilities run by Ukrainian energy conglomerate DTEK. All work has been halted, and most of the miners have since been evacuated, the company said Friday.
Maksym Timchenko, DTEK’s chief executive, was on a flight from D.C. to London when the strikes hit early Friday. In Washington, he had met business and congressional leaders to advocate for investment in Ukraine’s energy sector and help financing the decentralization of its energy supply, a strategy that he hopes will prevent massive damage from Russian attacks. For instance, transitioning energy production to wind turbine farms, would spread out the targets, he said.
When Timchenko landed and reconnected his phone, he learned the strikes had caused major damage to DTEK power stations and cut power to several regions across the country — the exact risk he had warned about in Washington.
Two of his company’s power stations are inoperable and the company’s overall capacity was reduced by at least half, he said. To restore up to 25 percent of overall capacity will take at least a month. Replacing high-voltage transformers poses another challenge, because the production time is eight to 10 months.
“We lost so much capacity because it’s highly concentrated,” Timchenko said. “It was one of the worst attacks since the full-scale invasion and one of the worst consequences for us and for our production facilities.”
The strikes came just as warmer weather has begun in Ukraine. Although Russia launched some attacks on energy infrastructure this winter, such strikes were less common and less damaging than the year before. Friday’s barrage followed another large missile assault directed at Kyiv early Thursday, which caused some damage to local infrastructure but was largely deflected by the capital’s air defense systems.
Air defense is key to protecting the country’s energy systems, Timchenko said. “They will continue attacks as long as we don’t have enough air defense systems,” he said. “None of the so-called passive protection that we built — sandbags, concrete blocks — can protect us [against] ballistic missiles.”
On Friday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that although Russia still legally considers the war in Ukraine to be a “special military operation,” the involvement of Western countries in supporting Ukraine has pushed Russia to “a state of war.”
“De facto, it turned into a war for us after the collective West has been increasing its level of involvement in the conflict more and more,” Peskov said.