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Ukrainian attack cuts off power in Russia's Zaporizhzhia

The Moscow-installed Governor said that a drone attack by Ukraine late Tuesday night knocked out the power in areas of Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia Region under Russian control.

Russian forces control more than half of the Zaporizhzhia Region in Ukraine's south-east. Kyiv still controls the main administrative centre of the region, and its attacks have regularly knocked out power in Russian-held regions.

In 2022, Russia annexed Zaporizhzhia, as well as Kherson, Donetsk, and Luhansk, in the east of Ukraine, around seven months after it invaded its smaller neighbor.

Yevgeny Baltsky, the newly appointed governor of Zaporizhzhia by Moscow, wrote in the Telegram app: "The cause for the power outages in Zaporizhzhia is yet another enemy drone attack on high voltage equipment."

Balitsky stated that repair crews are restoring power to affected areas and switching them over to reserve lines. The work was complicated "by the threat of repeated strikes and the darkness".

In June, Ukrainian shelling and drone strikes knocked out electricity for over 24 hours at least 700 000 residents in the region. This attack was the largest on Russian-held territories since the beginning of the war.

Director of Communications Yevgenia Yashina told Russia's RIA News Agency that the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station, Europe's biggest with six reactors and owned by Russia, continued to operate as usual, unaffected, by the power outages.

The plant does not produce electricity, but it needs power to run cooling systems and monitor safety systems. Ukraine and Russia accuse each of other regularly of staging attacks against the plant that was seized by Russian troops in the first few weeks of the invasion of February 2022.

Vyacheslav PROKUDIN, the governor of the Kherson region that is under Ukrainian control said in a Telegram message that Russian shelling had killed a resident from a small village north of the regional's capital.

Serhiy lysak, the governor of Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk Region, in the north, said that Russian shelling had killed a Nikopol resident, which is a common target of Moscow’s attacks on the Dnipro River's north bank. (Reporting and editing by Ron Popeski)

(source: Reuters)