Ukraine announces more blackouts and prepares for the battle of Jershon

Some four million Ukrainians are affected by electricity restrictions that will reach an “unprecedented” level in the coming days due to Russian bombing of energy infrastructure, Ukrainian authorities said on Friday. Kiev.

Russia For his part, he announced that the mobilization of 300,000 reservists decreed at the end of September had concluded and that 41,000 had already joined units in Ukraine.

Moscow In this way, it seeks to recover the military initiative, at a time when the Ukrainian army is preparing for a fierce battle to reconquer the occupied town of Kherson, in the south of the territory.

“Many cities and districts of our country apply courts to stabilize” the situation, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his daily evening briefing.

“Some four million Ukrainians are currently facing these restrictions,” he added.

The restrictions will be intensified to an “unprecedented” level in the coming days in the kyiv region, in order to avoid a “complete blackout”, the private Ukrainian operator DTEK noted a little earlier.

The United States announced that it will provide a new military aid package to kyiv worth about 275 million dollars, which will include four satellite communications antennas.

“We see that Ukraine’s infrastructure and power grids are under attack by the Russians and these antennas provide additional capacity on the ground at a critical time,” Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said.

Concluded mobilization

In Moscow, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu informed Russian President Vladimir Putin that “the task of recruiting 300,000 people” had been completed.

The mobilization, which caused an exodus of men and some protests, was decreed on September 21 with the aim of turning around the setbacks suffered by Moscow’s troops in Ukraine.

According to Shoigu, 82,000 conscripts are already in Ukraine and 41,000 are integrated into military units.

Putin, who launched an operation in Ukraine at the end of February, praised the mobilized soldiers, noting their “dedication to duty” and “patriotism.”

Russia has increased its bombing of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in the last two weeks, destroying at least a third of its facilities.

kyiv and its Western allies accuse Russia of using Iranian-made drones in these attacks, something both Moscow and Tehran deny.

The head of Ukrainian diplomacy, Dmytro Kuleba, asked his Iranian counterpart on Friday to stop “immediately” the delivery of weapons to Moscow.

The battle of Jershon

The Russian attacks come as kyiv intensifies its counteroffensive in the south of the country.

In the Jershon region, Moscow-installed authorities ensured that the evacuation of civilians from the eponymous city was completed.

The operation, which Ukraine describes as “deportation”, seeks to turn Jerson into a “fortress” in the face of a counteroffensive by Kiev’s troops.

“The work of organizing the departure of the inhabitants … to safe regions in Russia is over,” Sergei Aksionov, chief executive of Crimea, a neighboring Kherson peninsula annexed by Russia in 2014, said on Thursday.

An official from the Russian occupation of Kherson, Vladimir Saldo, said on Wednesday that at least 70,000 residents were able to leave their homes in less than a week.

Kherson, annexed last month by Moscow, had about 288,000 inhabitants before being occupied by Russian troops in the first weeks of the conflict. Recovering it would represent a clear advance for Ukraine.

The Ukrainian army said on Friday that the Russian command in Kherson was trying to “hide the real casualties” of its troops to “avoid panic”.

The head of the Russian republic of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, whose forces are fighting in Ukraine, said Thursday that 23 of his soldiers were killed earlier this week in a Ukrainian bombardment around that city.

Ukrainian authorities reported on Friday that Russian shelling damaged two residential buildings and a bakery in Mikolaiv (south), leaving one injured.

In the east, in the Donetsk region, five people have been killed and nine injured in the past 24 hours, especially in Bakhmut, which Russian forces are trying to conquer, Ukrainian regional governor Pavlo Kirilenko said.