More than 200,000 people remain without power in Ukraine’s central Dnipropetrovsk region following Russian attacks, authorities said on Oct. 30, a day after a deadly Russian drone strike on a train station there.
Russia’s defense ministry meanwhile said that its air defence systems had overnight shot down more than 1,000 Ukrainian drones across Russian regions.
Ukraine’s air force said Russia had used ballistic missiles and drones to attack several regions overnight, including Dnipropetrovsk, causing a widespread blackout in Dnipro city.
Power company DTEK said grid operator Ukrenergo had ordered emergency power cuts across the city, as well as in adjacent districts and in parts of Pavlograd district.
“Equipment in the region has been seriously damaged due to enemy attacks,” it said.
Dnipropetrovsk regional governor Oleksandr Ganzha said on Telegram that power engineers in the region had “restored electricity supply to most consumers in the region who were cut off due to Russian attacks”.
But he said that “more than 200,000 subscribers remain without power.”
Mykola Lukashuk, who heads the regional council, urged people to “assume that repeated attacks and prolonged disruptions to electricity, water and communications are possible”.
“Even if you currently have power, use this time to prepare for the next outage,” he advised residents across the region.
Dnipro mayor Borys Filatov also called on people to “keep a supply of water at home for at least one or two days”.
Russia has targeted Ukrainian energy infrastructure throughout the war, in attacks that Ukraine says are war crimes aimed at wearing down its resistance.
The strikes have often come ahead of winter, cutting heating and power to millions in freezing temperatures.
The power outages in Dnipro came after a Russian drone slammed into a busy railway platform there on Oct. 29, killing at least 14 people and wounding more than a dozen others, in an attack that President Volodymyr Zelensky described as “horrific.”
Meanwhile, the evacuation of stranded residents in Oleshky, a ravaged Ukrainian frontline city under Russian occupation, was beginning on Oct. 30 as part of a U.S.-brokered ceasefire, officials from both Russia and Ukraine said.
Captured by Russia in 2022, locals in the city had faced food, water and medicine shortages for months, with some being forced to hunt and eat pigeons, former residents told AFP.
Officials from both Moscow and Kiev arrived in Oleshky on Oct. 30 to oversee the operation.
The population of Oleshky has dropped from 24,000 before the war to about 2,000.
Over 250 Colombians have died and almost 1,000 have disappeared while fighting in the Russia-Ukraine war, the South American country’s foreign ministry reported on Oct. 29.
Colombian nationals are sought in fighting around the world due to their extensive experience of armed combat, and thousands have been pulled into this conflict.
In Ukraine, 162 Colombians had died and 666 had disappeared, while on the Russian side, 94 had perished and 297 were missing, the ministry said.
