Two nights of drone attacks leave thousands in Ukraine’s Odesa without power, heat

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By Iryna Nazarchuk and Olena Harmash

ODESA, Ukraine (Reuters) -Russia unleashed a mass drone attack on Ukraine’s southern city of Odesa for the second night running on Wednesday, knocking out power for thousands of residents and plunging parts of the city into darkness, the regional governor said.

Governor Oleh Kiper, writing on the Telegram messaging app, said the latest night-time strikes had triggered a blackout for some 5,000 residents.

Kiper said nearly 90,000 people had been left in the dark in Odesa district in and around the city from the successive nights of attacks. President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said a similar number was without heating.

Kiper also said the strikes had triggered a fire at a restaurant and a storage facility and damaged an administrative building. One person was injured.

Photos on social media showed areas of the city in darkness.

Four people, including a child, were injured in the initial attack on Tuesday. Heating was interrupted to about 500 apartment buildings, 13 schools, a kindergarten, and several hospitals, officials said.

The temperature in the Black Sea port was about minus 6 degrees Celsius (21 F).

“Rescue operations are underway in Odesa after another Russian attack on the energy infrastructure,” Zelenskiy wrote after the first attack.

“It is civilian energy facilities against which the Russian army has not spared neither missiles nor attack drones for almost three years,” he said.

The Ukrainian military said Russia launched 167 drones overnight on Tuesday in the region and elsewhere in the country. Air defence units and mobile drone hunting groups shot down 106 of them, and 56 drones were ‘lost’ in reference to the military using electronic warfare to counter unmanned aircraft, it said.

Russia has stepped up attacks on Ukrainian power infrastructure since March 2024, knocking out about half of the available generating capacity and causing widespread blackouts.

Schools and kindergartens in the district were closed on Wednesday.

“Everybody ran to the building hall. All the windows were blown out. The next hits scattered all the debris around. The furniture fell, the door was blown out as well,” Tetiana, an Odesa resident who declined to share her last name, told Reuters.

“Even the ventilation in the bathroom was knocked down – and they say that a bathroom is a safe place. No, it is not.”

Russia says it does not target civilians, though thousands have been killed since it launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

(Additional reporting by Anastasiia Malenko in Kyiv; Editing by Kate Mayberry, Ron Popeski and Bill Berkrot)