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Russia has pounded Ukraine's energy facilities with its biggest barrage of missiles yet, striking targets from east to west and causing widespread blackouts.
Neighbouring Moldova was also affected. It reported massive power outages after the strikes knocked out a key power line that supplies the small nation, an official said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Russia fired at least 85 missiles, "most of them at our energy infrastructure", and shut down power in many cities.
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"We're working, will restore everything. We will survive everything," the president vowed. His energy minister said it was "the most massive" bombardment of power facilities in the nearly 9-month-old Russian invasion.
The aerial assault, which resulted in at least one death in a residential building in the capital, Kyiv, followed days of euphoria in Ukraine sparked by one of its biggest military successes — the retaking last week of the southern city of Kherson.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has not commented on the retreat from Kherson since his troops pulled out in the face of a Ukrainian offensive. But the stunning scale of Tuesday's strikes spoke volumes and hinted at anger in the Kremlin.
By striking targets in the late afternoon, not long before dusk began to fall, the Russian military forced rescue workers to labor in the dark and gave repair crews scant time to assess the damage by daylight.
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At least a dozen regions reported strikes.
Zelenskyy said around 20 more strikes might be on the way. He urged people to stay safe and seek shelter.
"Most of the hits were recorded in the center and in the north of the country. In the capital, the situation is very difficult," said a senior official, Kyrylo Tymoshenko, appealing to Ukrainians to "hang in there"
The assault followed days of euphoria in Ukraine after one of its biggest military successes in the nearly nine-month Russian invasion — the retaking last week of the southern city of Kherson.
As its battlefield losses mount, Russia has in recent months increasingly resorted to targeting Ukraine's power grid, seemingly hoping to turn the approach of winter into a weapon by leaving people in the cold and dark.
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Among regions where officials reported strikes were Lviv, Zhytomyr, Khmelnytskyi and Rivne in the west, and Kharkiv, Ukraine's second largest city in the north-east. Several missile strikes also hit Kryvyi Rih, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's native city, according to its mayor, Oleksandr Vilkul.
In Kyiv, video published by a presidential aide showed a five-storey, apparently residential building on fire, with flames licking through apartments. The city mayor said three residential buildings were struck and that air defence units shot down other missiles.
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Klitschko added on his Telegram social media channel that medics and rescuers are being scrambled to the sites of the attacks.
Ukraine had seen a period of comparative calm since previous waves of drone and missile attacks several weeks ago.
The strikes came as authorities were already working furiously to get Kherson back on its feet and beginning to investigate alleged Russian abuses there and its surrounds.
The southern city is without power and water and the head of the UN human rights office's monitoring mission in Ukraine, Matilda Bogner, on Tuesday decried a "dire humanitarian situation" there.
Speaking from Kyiv, Bogner said her teams are looking to travel to Kherson to try to verify allegations of nearly 80 cases of enforced disappearances and arbitrary detention it has turned up in the area and "understand whether the scale is in fact larger than what we have documented already".
The head of the National Police of Ukraine, Igor Klymenko, said authorities are to start investigating reports from Kherson residents that Russian forces set up at least three alleged torture sites in now-liberated parts of the wider Kherson region and that "our people may have been detained and tortured there".
"Mine clearance is currently underway. After that, I think, today, investigative actions will begin," he said on Ukrainian TV.
The retaking of Kherson was one of Ukraine's biggest successes in the nearly nine-month-old Russian invasion and dealt another stinging blow to the Kremlin. But large parts of eastern and southern Ukraine remain under Russian control and fighting continues.
Zelenskyy on Tuesday likened the recapture of the Kherson to the Allied landings in France on D-Day in World War II, saying both were watersheds on the road to eventual victory.
The liberation of Kherson — the only provincial capital that Moscow had seized — has allowed families to be reunited for the first time in months. But as winter approaches, the city's remaining 80,000 residents are without heat, water or electricity, and short on food and medicine.
Still, US President Joe Biden called it a "significant victory" for Ukraine.
In his address to the G20, Zelenskyy called for the creation of a special tribunal to try Russian military and political figures for the crime of aggression against Ukraine, and the creation of an international mechanism to compensate Kyiv for wartime deaths and destruction.
Zelenskyy referred to the G20 meeting as "the G-19 summit," adhering to Kyiv's line that Russia should be excluded from the grouping.
"Everywhere, when we liberate our land, we see one thing — Russia leaves behind torture chambers and mass burials. … How many mass graves are there in the territory that still remains under the control of Russia?" Zelenskyy pointedly asked.
Source: 9News
