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.

Photograph: Libkos/Getty ImagesPeople 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.

Ukraine said it had destroyed 57 of the 82 missiles and drones launched by Russia during a major attack overnight on Wednesday – a relatively low proportion by Kyiv’s standards.

“The strikes on energy are linked in part with solving one of the tasks we set for ourselves, and that is demilitarisation,” Putin said, adding that the attacks had been timed for the spring and not in winter “out of humanitarian considerations”.

Ukraine has conducted more than a dozen waves of drone strikes at Russian oil refineries and related facilities aimed at disrupting the invader’s economy.

However, this week Lloyd Austin, the US defence secretary, publicly cautioned that such attacks could have “a knock-on effect” on global energy prices and called on Kyiv to focus on targets “that can directly influence the current fight”.