Major Russian air strikes destroy Kyiv power plant, damage other stations

Russian missiles and drones destroyed a large electricity plant near Kyiv and hit power facilities in several regions of Ukraine on Thursday, officials said, ramping up pressure on the embattled energy system as Kyiv runs low on air defences.

The major attack more than two years since Russia's full-scale invasion completely destroyed the Trypilska coal-powered thermal power plant near the capital, a senior official at the company that runs the facility told Reuters.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Moscow had been obliged to launch the strikes in response to Ukrainian attacks in recent weeks on energy targets inside Russia.

Footage on social media showed a fire raging at the large Soviet-era facility and smoke belching from it. Reuters was able to confirm the location of the video as the Trypilska station.

"We need air defence and other defence support, not eye-closing and long discussions," President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Telegram, condemning the attacks as "terror".

The Russian defence ministry said it hit fuel and energy facilities in Ukraine in what it described as a massive retaliatory strike using drones and high-precision, long-range weapons from air and sea.

The strikes were a response to Ukrainian drone attacks on Russia's oil, gas and energy facilities, it said.

Putin told his ally, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko that the attacks were a part of Russia's objective of the "demilitarisation" of Ukraine - one of the objectives of the Kremlin's 2022 invasion of its neighbour.

"Unfortunately, we observed a series of strikes on our energy sites recently and were obliged to respond," Russian news agencies quoted Putin as telling Lukashenko.

"The strikes on energy are linked in part with solving one of the tasks we set for ourselves, and that is demilitarisation. We believe above all that in this way we will affect Ukraine's military industrial complex and in a very direct way."

Russia, he said, had refrained from carrying out such attacks in winter "out of humanitarian considerations".

Kyiv's appeals for urgent air defence supplies from the West have grown increasingly desperate since Russia renewed its long-range aerial assaults on the Ukrainian energy system last month.

Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba was blunt in repeating calls for more US-made Patriot systems.

"What is there to discuss?" he told the Ukrainian state news agency Ukrinform during a visit to Slovakia. "There is only a single question: Give us Patriot systems! If we had Patriots, we would not have lost all of this today."

The attacks, which hammered thermal and hydroelectric power plants, sparked fears about the resilience of an energy system hobbled by a Russian air campaign in the war's first winter.

Ukraine's air force commander said air defences took down 18 of the incoming missiles and 39 drones. The attack used 82 missiles and drones in total, the military said.

The destroyed power plant outside Kyiv, a major supplier for the capital and Cherkasy and Zhytomyr regions, is the third and last facility owned by state-owned energy company Centrenergo.

"Everything is destroyed," Andriy Gota, head of the supervisory board of the company, said when asked about the situation at Centrenergo.