On the night of February 3, the Russians attacked Kharkiv with ballistic missiles and drones, targeting critical infrastructure. The mayor of the eastern Ukrainian city, Igor Terekhov, called the attack unprecedented, UNIAN reported.
According to local authorities, the strikes were deliberately carried out against energy infrastructure in order to cause maximum damage and leave the city without heating during the cold weather. Temperatures in the city are reaching minus 20 degrees Celsius.
Public transport may be disrupted and more than 800 buildings will be left without heating due to the "unprecedented attack by the enemy on critical infrastructure," the mayor of Kharkiv said.
The strikes on Kharkiv came after a several-day pause announced by Donald Trump, claiming that Russia had agreed not to strike the energy infrastructure of Kiev and other Ukrainian cities.
Russia launched new attacks on Kiev overnight after a several-day pause in strikes on the Ukrainian capital, achieved by Donald Trump, Agence France-Presse reported, noting that authorities said two people were injured.
"The Russians decided to strike Kiev in the cold", said the head of the local military administration, Timur Tkachenko, indicating that two people were injured.
On Friday The Kremlin said it had accepted the US president's request to refrain from strikes on Kiev and its energy grid until February 1, before the resumption of trilateral talks in Abu Dhabi. However, Russia continued its strikes on the rest of the country, with 12 people killed in an attack on a bus carrying mine workers in Ukraine's Dnipropetrovsk region on Sunday, BTA reported.
Initially scheduled for the end of last week, the second round of talks between Kiev, Moscow and Washington to find a way out of the war will take place tomorrow and the day after in the United Arab Emirates.
In January, Russian bombing caused heating outages in Kiev of a severity and duration not seen since the start of the full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022, AFP recalls.