Violent Ukrainian attack on Militopol and Russian Drone attack cutting off electricity in Odessa

Ukraine attacked the city of Melitopol, which is under Russian control on Saturday night, authorities’ appointed by Russia said.

Pro-Moscow authorities said a missile attack killed two people and wounded 10, while the exiled mayor said dozens of invaders had died.

“The air defense systems destroyed two missiles and four reached their targets,” Yevgeny Paletsky, the Moscow-appointed governor of Zaporizhia region, said on Telegram.

He added that a recreation center where people were eating was destroyed during the Ukrainian HIMARS attack.

Exiled mayor Ivan Fedorov said on his Telegram channel that the attack hit a church that Russians had turned into a gathering place.

Vladimir Rogov, another Moscow-appointed official in the Russian-controlled part of Zaporizhia, said a massive fire caused by the attack engulfed the entertainment center.

Oleksiy Aristovich, adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, said Melitopol, a major industrial and transport hub that Russia has occupied since March, was key to the defense of the south.

If Melitopol falls, the entire line of defense will collapse all the way to Kherson,” Aristovich said in a video interview on social media, that Ukrainian forces will get a direct road to Crimea”.

There was no immediate comment from the Ukrainian military on the attacks.

The Central Command of the Armed Forces of Ukraine said on Saturday that it had launched attacks on Melitopol.

Meanwhile, officials said on Saturday that power was cut off from all non-vital infrastructure in the southern Ukrainian port city of Odessa after Russia launched drones to bomb two power facilities, leaving 1.5 million people without power.

“The situation in the Odessa region is very difficult,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a video clip overnight.

“Unfortunately, the strikes were strong, so it takes more than just time to get the electricity back… It doesn’t take hours, but a few days, unfortunately”.

Since October, Moscow has targeted Ukraine’s energy infrastructure with a series of missile and drone strikes.

Zelensky said Norway has sent $100 million to help repair Ukraine’s power grid.

Serhiy Prachuk, a spokesman for the Odessa regional administration, said electricity would return to the city’s residents in the coming days, while a complete repair of the networks could take two to three months.

Prachuk said that the Ukrainian security services are investigating an earlier Facebook post by the district administration, in which he advised some people to consider evacuation as an element of the war waged by Russia.

This post was later deleted.

“No representative of the authorities in the region has made any calls for the evacuation of the residents of Odessa and the region,” Prachuk said.

Odessa, Ukraine’s largest port city, had a population of more than 1 million before Russia’s invasion on February 24.

Kiev says Russia has launched hundreds of Iranian-made Shahed-136 drones on targets in Ukraine, and describes the attacks as war crimes because of their devastating impact on civilian lives.

Moscow says the attacks are militarily legitimate.

The Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office said that Iranian Shahed-136 drones hit two energy facilities in the Odessa region.

The Ukrainian armed forces wrote on Facebook that 15 of these drones, which can carry explosives and fly towards their targets, were fired at targets in the southern regions of Odessa and Mykolaiv, but 10 of them were shot down.

Tehran denies supplying the drones to Moscow, and on the contrary, Kiev and its Western allies are saying that Iran is lying.

Britain’s Ministry of Defense said on Saturday it believed Iran’s military support to Russia was likely to increase in the coming months, including possible deliveries of ballistic missiles.