Russian attacks on Ukraine kill two, leave Donetsk region without power

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KYIV (Reuters) -Russian air attacks on Ukraine killed two people overnight and left tens of thousands more – and the entire eastern Donetsk region – without power, Ukrainian officials said on Sunday.

Moscow has stepped up missile and drone strikes on Ukraine as winter approaches, triggering outages and forcing emergency crews to quickly repair damage and manage rolling blackouts.

The two deaths were reported in Ukraine’s southern Odesa region, where officials said cargo trucks had come under attack, while nearly 60,000 residents in the southeastern Zaporizhzhia region lost power, local authorities said.

All of Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, where Russia is pressing forward on the battlefield, was also facing emergency power outages after attacks on energy infrastructure, its governor Vadym Filashkin said.

Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy system have been matched by its grinding offensive aimed at eventually capturing the industrialised region as diplomatic efforts to end the war have stalled.

In a statement, Ukraine’s energy ministry added that some residents in the northern Chernihiv and northeastern Kharkiv regions had also lost power.

Separately, the death toll from a Russian air attack that set ablaze a shop in the Dnipropetrovsk region on Saturday rose to four on Sunday, including two boys aged 11 and 14, the region’s acting governor said.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Sunday that Russia had launched nearly 1,500 attack drones, 1,170 guided aerial bombs, and more than 70 missiles at Ukraine over the past week including at residential buildings and civilian infrastructure.

Both sides deny targeting civilians in the war that Russia launched with its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but thousands have been killed, the vast majority of them Ukrainian.

(Reporting by Dan Peleschuk in Kyiv and Lidia Kelly in Melbourne; Editing by Jamie Freed and Hugh Lawson)