Russia Ukraine war live: Emergency blackout in Odesa after Putin’s drones strike electricity grid

Mother Aysa and her cubs, Emi, Santa and Teddi, spent nine months in a holding facility in Poland having escaped Russian bombs.

Aysa, from a private collection in the Donetsk region, was abandoned as Vladimir Putin’s invaders occupied Ukraine.

The park said Aysa was alone, malnourished and traumatised by bombings when she was rescued and taken to an interim sanctuary in Kyiv – where she gave birth to the cubs before they were all moved to a temporary facility at Poznan Zoo.

On Tuesday, they were driven the 1,000 miles to Yorkshire, arriving at the wildlife park before being unloaded at their new home on Thursday.

Emergency power outages were introduced in Ukraine’s port of Odesa on Monday after a Russian air attack damaged one of the high-voltage facilities there, Ukraine’s top energy provider DTEK said on Monday.

“The situation remains difficult,” DTEK said on the Telegram messaging app. “In order to reduce the load on the network, electric transport will not operate in the city today, and industrial consumption is also limited.”

Oleh Kiper, head of the region’s military administration, announced the blackout on the Telegram messaging app.

“The enemy once again attacked Odesa with attack drones. The energy infrastructure was damaged. There is no electricity supply in part of Odesa,” he wrote.

Kiper added that all emergency services were working.

On the evening of March 24, the Russian military launched several groups of attack drones from the Black Sea at Odesa.

A fire early on Monday at one of the largest thermal power plants in southwestern Russia took two of its units out of operation, briefly disrupting supply to customers, the region’s governor said.

But there were no casualties and authorities were investigating the cause of the fire at the Novocherkassk power plant in Rostov, the governor, Vasily Golubev, said on the Telegram messaging app.

Russia’s defence ministry said its forces destroyed 11 drones launched overnight over Rostov by Ukraine, which borders the region, but did not say if there was any related damage.

The Baza Telegram news channel, which is close to Russian law enforcement, said the fire at the plant was caused by Ukraine’s drones, however.

Reuters could not independently verify the report. Ukraine made no immediate comment on the attacks.

Novocherkassk is one of the largest thermal power plants in Russia’s southwest, its owner, OGK-2, which is controlled by a subsidiary of Russia’s energy giant Gazprom (GAZP.MM), opens new tab, says on its website.

Russia cast doubt on assertions by the United States that the Islamic State militant group was responsible for a gun attack on a concert hall outside Moscow which killed 137 people and injured 182 more.

In the deadliest attack inside Russia for two decades, four men burst into the Crocus City Hall on Friday night, spraying people with bullets just before Soviet-era rock group Picnic was to perform its hit “Afraid of Nothing”.

President Vladimir Putin said some people on “the Ukrainian side” had been prepared to spirit the gunmen across the border. Ukraine has denied any role in the attack and President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has accused Putin of seeking to divert blame for the concert hall attack by referring to Ukraine.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, called into question U.S. assertions that Islamic State, which once sought control over swathes of Iraq and Syria, was behind the attack.

“Attention – a question to the White House: Are you sure it’s ISIS? Might you think again about that?” Zakharova said in an article for the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper.

Zakharova said the United States was spreading a version of the “bogeyman” of Islamic State to cover its “wards” in Kyiv and reminded readers that Washington supported the “mujahideen” fighters who fought Soviet forces in the 1980s.

Ukraine sharply increased imports of electricity and halted exports on Sunday after a series of missile and drone attacks on the country’s energy system, the energy ministry said.

“For the current day, electricity imports are forecast at 14,900 megawatt hour (Mwh). No exports are expected,” the ministry said in a statement.

Ukraine imported 3,300 Mwh a day before the attack on March 22, with exports of 2,148 Mwh.

Generating and transmission facilities were attacked by Russia on Friday, causing significant blackouts in many regions. Energy facilities in three Ukrainian regions were also attacked and on this Sunday morning.

The ministry said Russians had attempted to hit a critical energy infrastructure facility in the Lviv region.

Missiles targeting the Lviv region during the early hours of Sunday morning passed close to the Polish border, with one entering its airspace for as long as 39 seconds.

The violation led to the Polish air force placing their F-16 fighter jets on high alert, with a warning that increased noise levels were expected in the southeastern part of the country.

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President Volodymyr Zelensky said efforts to restore power supplies were under way in various regions, with the greatest difficulties in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city.

The country’s energy ministry and distributors said Ukraine ramped up imports of electricity and halted exports after the recent series of Russian attacks, in which top energy producer DTEK lost 50% of its capacity.

Volodymyr Kudritskyi, head of Ukrenergo, which operates Ukraine’s transmission lines, said the latest wave of strikes had caused damage of at least 90 million euros ($97 million).

Speaking of Russia’s violation into Polish airspace, Henryk Zdyb, the head of the village of Oserdow, said in an interview with the daily Gazeta Wyborcza that he saw the missile, saying it produced a whistling sound.

“I saw a rapidly moving object in the sky. It was illuminated and flying quite low over the border with Ukraine,” he told the paper.

Since Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine more than two years ago, there have been a number of intrusions into Polish airspace, triggering worry in the European Union and NATO member state and reminding people of how close the war is.

“We have to come to terms with the fact that the war is taking place right next to us, and we are part of the confrontation between the West and Russia,” commentator Artur Bartkiewicz wrote in the Rzeczpospolita newspaper Sunday.