Russian missiles spread damage as Ukraine fights to get repairs done

KYIV, Ukraine – Russian missiles rained down on Ukraine on Sunday as the embattled country struggled to recover from the last round of Russian attacks and wondered how many more salvos could be coming its way.

Russian forces shelled the southern Ukrainian Kherson region more than 50 times this weekend, reported Yaroslav Yanushevych, the local military governor. Taking to Telegram, he accused Russia of terrorism and of targeting civilians, reporting that one person had died and two had been injured.

The city of Kryvyi Rih in the south of Ukraine was also hit by a Russian missile attack, local authorities said.

Two missiles destroyed a transport infrastructure facility in the morning, military governor Valentyn Resnichenko wrote on the Telegram news channel, without providing further details.

The military administration called on the population to head to air raid shelters. An air raid alert was issued for several areas in the east and south of Ukraine.

The Nikopol district north of the Dnipro River was also hit with shells and heavy artillery, according to Ukrainian sources.

Overnight, two missiles hit a farm in a suburb of the southern Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhya, according to the military.

As the attacks came, Ukraine struggled to recover from a brutal barrage last week that knocked out power and water to large parts of the country.

By early on Sunday, most electricity, water, heating and mobile phone services were up and running, the military administration in the Ukrainian capital said on its Telegram channel. Final work was continuing on the electricity grid, but high demand could lead to local outages, the military authorities said.

Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko, who has come in for criticism from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for being slow to restore services, told the Sunday edition of Germany’s mass-circulation Bild newspaper that work was proceeding at “record pace.”

Meanwhile, much of the city of Kherson remains without electrical power as the authorities battle to get the grid operational again. While one hospital again has power, just 5% of the population has been connected.

Naturally, much of the focus in Ukraine and the rest of Europe is now on how likely it seems that Russia can keep up this pace of attack.

For example, Estonian Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur does not believe that Russia has been critically weakened even after nine months of war in Ukraine.

“We have to be honest and clear: The Russian navy and air force are more or less as big as they were before the war,” Pevkur told German Press Agency during a visit to Berlin.

Although the Russian land forces had lost considerable strength, they would “sooner rather than later” have the size they had before Feb. 24 when they launched their offensive – or even larger.

Russia will also learn from their military experience in Ukraine, he said: “We have no reason to believe that the threat from Russia is somehow reduced or that the threat to NATO is reduced.”

That said, the British government posted in its daily intelligence report on the fight on Sunday that it seems that Russia is taking heavy losses in the Donetsk region as the fighting there continues. London says the fact that Russia is fighting with such intensity there could signal that Moscow is hoping to start an offensive to the north from the province.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began on Feb. 24, and Moscow has since declared four regions in eastern and southern Ukraine to be part of Russian territory; the overall battle lines have changed little in the past weeks.