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Residents stand near their apartment buildings hit by a Russian drone strike in the town of Shakhtarske, Dnipropetrovsk region, Ukraine, October 19, 2025. Photo: Reuters (archive)
Kyiv:
Russia fired a wave of drones and missiles into Ukraine overnight, killing at least six people, including two children, and cutting power to tens of thousands, officials said Sunday.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the attacks, which also injured a dozen other people, showed that Moscow sought to “inflict harm” on civilians, announcing that kyiv had strengthened its air defense in response.
Russia has rejected U.S. calls to end its nearly four-year invasion of Ukraine, instead continuing its ground attack while renewing its campaign of strikes against Ukraine’s energy network.
kyiv announced on Saturday that it had deployed special forces to the eastern city of Pokrovsk, where it is under pressure from an intense Russian assault involving thousands of troops.
“Russian forces attacked the Dnipropetrovsk and Odessa regions. Six people died, including two children,” the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office said on Telegram.
The children were two boys aged 11 and 14, Ukraine’s human rights commissioner Dmytro Lubinets said.
The Russian attacks knocked out power throughout the eastern region of Donetsk, as well as to nearly 58,000 homes in the southern region of Zaporizhzhia, the governors of those regions said.
kyiv says strikes on energy infrastructure are primarily aimed at exhausting the country’s civilian population, a charge Russia denies.
Ukraine under pressure
The nighttime attacks came a day after Ukraine’s top military commander announced he had deployed special forces to the eastern city of Pokrovsk, where kyiv is under pressure from a thousands-strong Russian army.
Hundreds of Russian troops have infiltrated the logistics center, Kyiv said earlier this week.
Others are closing in on its periphery in a pincer-like movement, according to maps of the battlefield published by the Institute for the Study of War.
Capturing the city would provide a major propaganda boost to the Kremlin, which has rejected calls for a peace deal on the current front lines.
“A comprehensive operation aimed at destroying and displacing enemy forces from Pokrovsk is underway,” Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrsky said in a Facebook post on Saturday.
Videos posted on social media showed helicopters flying toward the city, while another video purportedly taken by a Russian drone showed silhouettes emerging from a helicopter that had landed in a field.
Russia fired more missiles at Ukraine in nighttime attacks in October than in any other month since at least early 2023, according to an AFP analysis of Ukrainian air force data.
