Moscow: President Vladimir Putin has held extensive meetings with the military top brass overseeing Russia’s campaign in Ukraine, where Moscow has stepped up bombardments, the Kremlin said Saturday.
“On Friday, the president spent the whole day at the army staff involved in the special military operation in Ukraine,” a statement said.
He held a meeting with Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov and held “separate discussions with commanders” from different defence branches, it said.
“I would like to hear your proposals on our actions in the short- and medium-term,” Putin was shown as saying in the meeting by Russia’s state television.
Ukraine was working Saturday to restore electricity to hospitals, heating systems and other critical infrastructure in major cities after Russia’s latest wave of attacks on the power grid prompted accusations of “war crimes”.
The volley of missiles unleashed Friday pitched multiple cities into darkness, cutting water and heat and forcing people to endure below-freezing temperatures.
In the capital, where the mayor said only a third of residents had heat or water, people wrapped in winter coats crammed into underground metro stations after air raid sirens rang out in the morning.
Ukraine’s national energy provider imposed emergency blackouts, saying its system had lost more than half its capacity after strikes targeted “backbone networks and generation facilities”.
Ukrenergo warned the extent of the damage in the north, south and centre of the country meant it could take longer to restore supplies than after previous attacks.
By evening, second city Kharkiv had restored power to just over half its residents, while hoping to have a fully operational grid by midnight.
France and the European Union said the suffering inflicted on freezing civilians constitutes war crimes, with the bloc’s foreign policy chief calling the bombings “barbaric”.
Russia fired 74 missiles—mainly cruise missiles—on Friday, 60 of which were shot down by anti-aircraft defences, according to the Ukrainian army.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the strikes left the capital Kyiv and 14 regions affected by power and water cuts.
“All their targets today are civilian, and these are mainly energy and heat supply facilities,” he said in his nightly address.
“Probably, as a result of this war, the meaning of the word ‘terror’ for most people in the world will be associated primarily with such crazy actions of Russia.”
In the central city of Kryvyi Rig, where Zelensky was born, the airstrikes hit a residential building.
Nato chief Jens Stoltenberg told AFP that Russia was readying for a protracted war.
“We see that they are mobilising more forces, that they are willing to suffer also a lot of casualties, that they are trying to get access to more weapons and ammunition,” he said.
