Kyiv Region Governor Oleksii Kuleba said the attack did not kill or injure anyone. Electricity transmission company Ukrenergo said repair crews were working to restore power, but warned residents of possible outages. Kyrylo Tymoshenko, the deputy head of the office of the Ukrainian president, urged residents of the Kyiv region and residents of three neighboring regions to reduce energy consumption during evening peak demand hours. After a truck bomb explosion a week ago damaged the bridge linking Russia to the annexed Crimean peninsula, the Kremlin launched its biggest coordinated missile attacks since the initial invasion of Ukraine. This week’s widespread retaliatory attacks hit residential buildings, killing dozens of people, as well as civilian infrastructure such as power plants near Kyiv and other cities far from the front lines of the war. Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Friday that Moscow saw no need for additional mass strikes, but that his military would continue selective strikes. He said that of the 29 targets the Russian military planned to hit in this week’s attacks, seven were not damaged and would be phased out. The Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank, interpreted Putin’s comments as aimed at countering criticism from pro-war Russian bloggers who “largely praised the resumption of strikes against Ukrainian cities but warned that a short campaign would be ineffective. “ “Putin knew that he would not be able to withstand high-intensity missile strikes for a long time because of his reduced arsenal of high-precision missiles,” the think tank said. The areas of southern Ukraine that Putin illegally designated as Russian territory last month remained the focus of fighting on Saturday. Kirill Stremousov, deputy head of the Moscow-based administration in the mainly Russian-held Kherson region, reminded residents that they could evacuate to Crimea and cities in southwestern Russia as Ukrainian forces try to fight for the regional capital. After worried Kremlin-backed leaders in the region asked civilians on Thursday to evacuate to ensure their safety and give Russian troops more flexibility, Moscow offered free accommodation to residents who agreed to leave. Ukrainian troops tried to advance south along the banks of the Dnieper River but gained no ground, according to Stremousov. “The defense lines worked and the situation remained under the full control of the Russian military,” he wrote on his messaging app channel. In the neighboring Zaporizhzhia region, Governor Oleksandr Starukh said the Russian military carried out strikes with Iranian kamikaze drones and S-300 missiles. Some experts said the Russian military’s use of long-range missiles may reflect a shortage of special precision weapons for hitting ground targets. To the north and east of Kherson, Russian shelling killed two civilians in the Dnipropetrovsk region, Governor Valentin Reshnichenko said. He said the shelling of the city of Nikopoli, located across the Dnieper from the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, damaged a dozen residential buildings, several shops and a transport facility.
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