Russian forces maintained an artillery and missile barrage in several regions of Ukraine, often targeting energy infrastructure, while heavy fighting persisted in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions in the east of the country.
During the first snow of the winter in Kiev, officials said they were working to restore electricity across the country after Russia earlier this week unleashed what Ukraine called the heaviest bombing of infrastructure civilians during the war, which began on February 24, when Russia invaded its neighbor.
About 10 million people are without electricity, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in a video on Thursday, in a country with a pre-war population of about 44 million. Authorities in some places have ordered emergency forced blackouts, Zelenskiy said.
Ukraine’s electricity infrastructure came under heavy new attacks on Thursday, from the capital Kiev in the north to Dnipro in central Ukraine and Odessa in the south, the military said in a statement.
In the past 24 hours, Ukrainian forces have shot down two cruise missiles, five air-launched missiles and five Iranian-made Shahed-136 drones, the military said. Reuters was unable to verify the battlefield reports.
Pope Francis reiterated on Friday that the Vatican was ready to do everything possible to mediate and end the conflict.
“We must all be pacifists,” he told the Italian newspaper La Stampa. “To want peace, not just a truce that serves only to rearm. True peace, which is the fruit of dialogue”.
In the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, Russian forces have been reinforced by troops withdrawn from the southern city of Kherson, which Ukraine retook last week.
“TORTURE CHAMBER”
Investigators in the recaptured territory in the Kherson area have discovered 63 bodies with signs of torture after Russian forces left, Ukraine’s interior minister said.
The human rights commissioner of the Ukrainian parliament, Dmytro Lubinets, has released a video of what he said was a torture chamber used by Russian forces in the Kherson region, including a small room in which he said they were held up to to 25 people at a time.
Reuters was unable to verify the allegations – which included using electric shocks to obtain confessions – made by Lubinets and others in the video. Russia denies that its troops deliberately attack civilians or commit atrocities.
Mass graves have been found elsewhere previously occupied by Russian troops, including some with civilian bodies showing signs of torture.
A Reuters witness in Kherson heard explosions in the city center on Friday morning and saw black smoke rising from behind buildings. The police blocked access, but the confusion does not seem to have disturbed the hundreds of people in the central square, queuing to receive humanitarian aid.
Elsewhere, Russian forces have fired artillery in the towns of Bakhmut and nearby Soledar in the Donetsk region, among others, the Ukrainian military said.
Russian fire also hit Balakliya in northeastern Kharkiv region, which Ukraine recaptured in September, and Nikopol, a city on the opposite bank of the Kakhovka Reservoir from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, a statement said.
The advice of the United Nations nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has again urged Russia to immediately withdraw from Zaporizhzhia, Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, and to end all shares in Ukrainian nuclear power plants.
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Source: Terra
Camila Luna is a writer at Gossipify, where she covers the latest movies and television series. With a passion for all things entertainment, Camila brings her unique perspective to her writing and offers readers an inside look at the industry. Camila is a graduate from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) with a degree in English and is also a avid movie watcher.
