Zelenskiy says Russia hits Ukraine's energy grid in one of war's largest strikes, nine killed
The attack comes days after Moscow's mayor said 650 Ukrainian drones targeted the Russian capital region overnight on October 5.
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Map: Ukraine, marking Kyiv
Russia launched one of its largest strikes of the war on Ukraine's energy sector, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said, with attacks across the country killing nine people.
The strike adds to an exchange that has intensified through the autumn. Moscow's mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, said 650 Ukrainian drones targeted the Russian capital region overnight on October 5, a sharp jump in scale from recent attacks on refineries and shipping. Russia's defence ministry has linked a threat to intensify strikes on Kyiv and other Ukrainian regions to Zelenskiy's own pledge, made on October 3, that Ukraine will keep hitting Russian oil refineries rather than civilian targets.
President Donald Trump said on October 6 that the war is getting closer to ending but that the United States still has to finish it off. He named no new mechanism for doing so.
The scale of the latest strike on power infrastructure extends rather than reverses the pattern of recent weeks, in which bridges, refineries and now broad sections of the power grid have come under attack even as diplomatic statements point toward a possible endgame. Nine deaths from an attack described as among the war's largest add to a toll that has climbed alongside Kremlin statements vowing mass retaliatory strikes and insisting that conditions for talks remain not ready. The gap between that rhetoric and the intensity on the ground remains as wide as it has been since late September.