Hundreds of buildings without heat in Ukraine capital
Around 1,600 buildings in Kyiv remained without heat Sunday after a barrage of Russian attacks on energy infrastructure, officials said, as Ukraine's army claimed a strike on a key oil terminal in Russia. Authorities in the Ukrainian capital say around 1,100 residential buildings and 500 other buildings were still without heat in Kyiv, in the midst of a gruelling winter of war. Russia's recent attacks have triggered Ukraine's worst energy crisis of the nearly four-year-old war, leaving hundreds of thousands of homes without heat and electricity at a time when temperatures have dropped as low as -20C.
Deputy Prime Minister Oleksiy Kuleba said overnight that Russian strikes had also damaged railroad infrastructure in the southern region of Odesa and central-eastern region of Dnipropetrovsk. Ukraine has also targeted Russian energy infrastructure with drone strikes, targeting the oil and gas industries helping to fund the invasion Moscow launched in February 2022. The governor of the Russian border region of Bryansk said five municipalities and part of the regional capital had been left without heat and electricity by an "enemy attack" Sunday. Ukraine's army meanwhile said it had hit a key oil terminal in southern Russia near Moscow-annexed Crimea.
"An oil terminal in southern Russia and the Pantsir-S1 air defence system in the temporarily occupied territory of Crimea has been hit," Ukraine's General Staff said in a statement. The attack was on the Tamanneftegaz oil terminal near the village of Volna in the Krasnodar region. Volna is home to the Black Sea port of Taman, used for Russian oil, coal and grain shipments. Ukraine said the strike was part of "measures to reduce the offensive and economic potential of the Russian aggressor".
Krasnodar governor Veniamin Kondratyev had earlier said a Ukrainian attack had damaged an oil storage facility in Volna and wounded two people. More than 100 firefighters had been deployed to extinguish "several fires", he added. A house in Russia's Black Sea resort of Sochi -- largely spared from the attacks other southern cities have seen -- was also damaged, Kondratyev said.
