Ukraine air defences overwhelmed as Russia pounds power stations

Ukraine’s air defences are being overwhelmed by concentrated waves of Russian bombing aimed at its power stations, acknowledged a senior presidential adviser after the destruction of an entire plant on Thursday.

Mykhailo Podolyak said Moscow was adopting new tactics of attacking power stations with up to “10 or 12 missiles at a time”, bypassing already stretched Patriot and other missile shields.

“The system is overloaded,” Podolyak said in an interview. “Now we have to see whether we can keep the system running, whether we need more air defence systems, especially against anti-ultrasonic ballistic missiles, and whether we can restore the destroyed facilities.”

On Thursday, Trypilska, a coal and gas fired plant south of Kyiv, was destroyed after Russian bombing caused fire to break out in the turbine hall, according to its operator, Centrenergo.

The energy company said that while no staff were killed, it had lost 100% of its generating capacity. “The scale of destruction is terrifying,” said its chair, Andriy Gota. The attack came three weeks after the same company lost the Zmiiv power station to Russian bombing near the city of Kharkiv.

People who lived near the fossil fuel plant described the site being hit by multiple missile strikes shortly before 5am on Thursday, causing a fire that took several hours to put out, leaving the main building a charred ruin overlooking a lake near the country’s central Dnipro River.

The destruction meant nearby towns had lost their source of winter heating. In Ukraine, many homes rely on district systems for warmth during the winter.

Anatol Shevchenko, a garage worker who lives a few miles from the power plant, said he and his wife counted six explosions. It was a relief that the attack took place in early April, he said, after the end of winter and during a period of unusually warm weather, with highs in the mid twenties. But he said that if the Russians succeeded that “it would mean cutting electricity supplies in summer and the fridges won’t work, so it’s not like summer is the solution”.