'Russia is targeting civilians' — Casualties, outages reported following Russian drone strikes on residential buildings in Odesa
Editor's note: This story has been updated to include additional details about power cuts and damage to a logistics center.
Russian forces launched a large-scale drone attack on Odesa overnight Dec. 30-31, striking residential buildings, leaving parts of the city without heat, electricity or water, and injuring six people, including three children, local officials said.
Over 170,000 people are without power after the attack, Ukraine's Energy Ministry said on Wednesday morning.
Explosions were reported in the city around 12:20 a.m. local time, according to a Kyiv Independent journalist on the ground.
Ukraine's Air Force warned of dozens of drones approaching the city late on Dec. 30. Air raid warnings were also issued amid the threat of ballistic missile attacks.
Serhii Lysak, the head of Odesa City Military Administration, first reported that two multi-storey residential buildings had been struck by Russian drones amid the attack, causing a fire to break out.
"Another proof that Russia is targeting civilians," Lysak wrote on social media following the strike on the building.
Among the injured were three children, including a 7-month-old infant.
Falling debris from a drone also caused a fire at a sorting terminal of Ukrainian logistics giant Nova Poshta, destroying 110 parcels with a declared value of Hr 2.3 million ($55,000), the company said.
Odesa and the surrounding regions have recently come under Russian fire amid Moscow's ongoing attacks on Ukraine's energy sector — which have intensified with colder weather in an apparent effort to create a nationwide blackout.
Power outages in Odesa Oblast are linked to Russian attacks from October through December, with the scale of damage to energy facilities from Russian attacks making rolling blackouts unpredictable, Ukraine's Energy Ministry said on Dec. 30.
Russian forces have regularly attacked Ukrainian cities in recent months amid U.S. efforts to negotiate an end of Russia's war in Ukraine.
Despite multiple rounds of negotiations, the fate of ongoing peace talks remains uncertain amid Moscow's refusal to budge from its maximalist demands in Ukraine.
