Zelenskiy says Russia targeted gas facilities that secure EU supply

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said a Russian attack on his country’s energy sector on Saturday (27 April) had targeted gas facilities important for supply to the European Union.

Russia continues to supply gas to the EU via Ukraine under a transit deal with Russia’s Gazprom that is set to expire in December. Ukraine’s energy minister said last month that Kyiv had no plans to extend or replace the arrangement with Moscow, which pays Ukraine to export its gas to the EU.

“The main target was the energy sector, various facilities in the industry, both electricity and gas transit facilities, in particular, those gas facilities that are crucial to ensuring safe delivery to the European Union,” Zelenskyy said in his nightly video address.

Zelenskyy, who is campaigning for supplies of defensive weapons systems from his international partners, said that Ukrainian forces had “managed to shoot down some” of the 34 Russian missiles of various types.

He did not say which specific facilities were targeted, nor whether missiles hit those targets.

Ukraine’s state-run oil and gas firm Naftogaz said Russia had attacked its facilities but that no-one was hurt and supplies to Ukrainian consumers and clients were unaffected.

Maksym Kozytskyi, the governor of Lviv region, which borders Poland, said his region had suffered strikes during an attack by cruise missiles and Kinzhal hypersonic missiles, though Ukrainian forces shot down three missiles.

He said two critical energy infrastructure objects in Stryi and Chervonohrad districts were damaged and caught fire, though emergency services quickly extinguished the flames.

“The enemy again massively shelled Ukrainian energy facilities,” said DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private electricity company, adding that four of its six thermal power plants had suffered damage overnight.

Rescuers battled to put out fires at several energy facilities in the western regions of Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk, which border NATO members Poland and Romania, officials said.

After strikes on energy facilities in the central Dnipropetrovsk region, running water supplies were disrupted in President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s hometown of Kryvyi Rih, officials said.

Zelenskyy repeated his previous plea for defensive missiles, particularly Patriot systems, saying Ukraine needed at least seven defensive systems.

“The trajectories of the missiles and the nature of the strike were calculated by Russian terrorists in a way to make the work of our air defence system as difficult as possible,” he said. “Each downed rocket today is a significant result.”

In the northeastern city of Kharkiv, which has been heavily bombed in recent weeks, a missile struck a hospital holding 60 patients overnight, injuring a woman and damaging the building, nearby water pipes and power lines, the regional governor said.

Ukraine has lost 80% of its thermal power generation and 35% of its hydroelectric capacity during Russian attacks, officials say.

Though the core of the energy system comes from nuclear power, that lost capacity serves a balancing function in the grid and its loss could be a big problem when consumption rises later this year, officials say.

Rolling blackouts have been introduced in several regions, but the full impact of the attacks has not been felt as consumption, which peaks in winter and the height of summer, is low because of mild weather.

Ukraine strikes back

Ukraine, which has tried to take the fight back to Russia in recent months using long-range drones, attacked the Ilsky and Slavyansk oil refineries in Russia’s Krasnodar region overnight, a Ukrainian intelligence source told Reuters.

The drone strike conducted by the SBU security service caused fires at the facilities, the source said. Russia’s Kushchevsk military airfield was also attacked in the southern region, the source added.

The Slavyansk oil refinery was forced to suspend some operations after being damaged in the attack, Russian state news agency TASS cited an executive overseeing the plant as saying.

The United States approved a major aid package for Ukraine this week, overcoming a congressional deadlock that dragged on for six months as Kyiv’s weapon stocks became depleted.

The Pentagon said on Friday it would buy $6 billion worth of new weapons for Ukraine including interceptors for the Patriot air defence system.

Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles, who visited Lviv on Saturday, announced a $100 million military aid package including short-range air defence and drones with air-to-ground precision munitions coming separately.

(Edited by Georgi Gotev)

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