Around 1,600 buildings still without heating in kyiv, Ukraine responds with strike on Russian oil terminal

A worrying situation during this period of extreme cold. Around 1,600 buildings were still without heat in kyiv on Sunday, according to local authorities, a consequence of the barrage of Russian strikes on energy infrastructure, while Ukrainian forces claimed responsibility for the attack on an oil terminal in Russia.

Of the 2,600 buildings without heating after a massive Russian attack on kyiv on Thursday, “around 500 buildings remain without heating,” said the mayor of the Ukrainian capital, Vitali Klitschko on Sunday on Telegram.

These 2,600 buildings were in addition to more than 1,100 residential buildings – out of a total of 12,000 in the capital – already deprived of heating after the Russian attacks in recent weeks which permanently damaged the power station supplying them, which brings a total of 1,600 buildings currently without heating.

Russian attacks on Ukraine’s energy network have caused the worst energy crisis in the country since the start of Moscow’s offensive launched in February 2022, with hundreds of thousands of homes deprived of heat and electricity by temperatures sometimes dropping below -20°C.

Railway infrastructure in the Odessa and Dnipropetrovsk regions was also damaged in nighttime Russian strikes, Deputy Prime Minister Oleksiï Kuleba said on Telegram.

“Result of an enemy attack”

kyiv, for its part, is also targeting Russian territory with drones, particularly its hydrocarbon infrastructure, to weaken the war effort of Russian forces, whose offensive in Ukraine is soon entering its fifth year and has caused at least tens of thousands of deaths.

The governor of Russia’s Bryansk border region, Alexander Bogomaz, said five municipalities and part of the city of Bryansk were without heat and electricity “as a result of an enemy attack” by Ukrainian drones on Sunday.

The Ukrainian military also claimed responsibility for the attack on the Tamanneftegaz oil terminal near the village of Volna in the Krasnodar region. “The attack (…) was confirmed. A fire was reported at the scene,” she said on Sunday.

The governor of the Krasnodar region, Veniamin Kondratyev, said earlier in the day that a storage site for oil products had been hit in the port of the village of Volna on the shores of the Black Sea. Volna is home to the port of Taman, on the eponymous peninsula.

This infrastructure, located near the Kerch and Crimea bridge, is used for the transshipment of grain, petroleum and chemical products. “An oil tank, a warehouse and terminals were damaged,” said the governor, reporting two injuries and the deployment of around a hundred firefighters to extinguish “several fires”.

Ukrainian forces also claimed to have carried out several other strikes in the past 24 hours against military installations in occupied Ukraine.