Kyiv, Ukraine (AP) – Ukrainian forces on Thursday attacked Russia’s hold on the southern city of Kherson, while fighting also intensified in the east of the country. The fighting came amid reports that Moscow-appointed authorities in Kherson have fled the city, joining tens of thousands of residents who have been evacuated to other Russian-controlled areas.
Surrounding Kherson from the west, Ukrainian troops attacked Russia’s base on the west bank of the Dnieper River, which divides the region and the country.
Amid the fighting, Russia issued a warning that the United States could be drawn into the conflict, adding that it could attack Western commercial satellites used for military purposes in support of Ukraine.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova accused the United States of engaging in a “thoughtless and insane” escalation. She argued that Washington should take a more responsible approach, demonstrated during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis — when the Cold War superpowers stepped back from the brink of nuclear confrontation.
Ukraine has advanced an offensive to retake the Kherson region and its eponymous capital, which Russian forces captured in the first days of a war now in its ninth month.
More than 70,000 residents of the city of Kherson have been evacuated in recent days, said the Kremlin’s governor of the region, Vladimir Saldo, on Thursday.
Members of the Russian-backed regional administration were included in the evacuation, Deputy Governor Kirill Stremousov said. Monuments to Russian heroes were moved along with the remains of Grigory Potemkin, the Russian general who founded Kherson in the 18th century, preserved in the city’s St Catherine’s Church.
In eastern Ukraine, Russian forces continued to bombard the city of Bakhmut in the Donetsk region, slowly advancing towards the center.
Amid heavy fighting on two fronts, Russian officials have stepped up warnings that the West could become part of the conflict.
“The more the US is drawn into supporting the Kiev regime on the battlefield, the more it risks provoking a direct military confrontation between the largest nuclear powers with catastrophic consequences,” said Zakharova, the spokeswoman for Russia’s foreign ministry.
“Washington is now upping the ante and appears to believe it has the ability to control the escalation,” she said.
Deputy head of Russia’s delegation to a UN arms control body, Konstantin Vorontsov, described the use of American and other Western commercial satellites for military purposes during the fighting in Ukraine as “extremely dangerous”.
“The quasi-civilian infrastructure could be a legitimate target for a retaliatory strike,” Vorontsov warned.
As they had been throughout the month, Russian forces carried out attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, raising concerns ahead of the winter.
A Russian drone attack hit a power plant near the capital Kyiv early Thursday, causing a fire, Kyiv regional governor Oleksiy Kuleba said. He said the recent attacks had done “very serious damage”.
“Russians are using drones and missiles to destroy Ukraine’s energy system before winter and terrorize civilians,” Kuleba said in a televised address.
Kuleba announced new rolling blackouts and urged consumers to conserve electricity. He said authorities were still pondering the details of the power outages, which would be needed to restore the damaged power plants.
Kyrylo Tymoshenko, deputy head of Ukraine’s presidential office, said rolling blackouts would also be introduced in the neighboring Chernihiv, Cherkassy and Zhytomyr regions.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said earlier that Russian attacks had already destroyed 30% of the country’s energy infrastructure.
In a likely response to Russia’s attacks on Ukraine’s infrastructure, a power plant near Sevastopol, a port in Russia’s annexed Crimea region, was attacked. According to Mayor Mikhail Razvozhayev, the plant was slightly damaged in a drone attack. He said power was uninterrupted.
Crimea, a region slightly larger than Sicily, was annexed by Russia from Ukraine in 2014. During the fighting in Ukraine, she was subjected to drone strikes and explosions. In a major setback for Russia, on October 8 a powerful truck bomb blew up a section of a strategic bridge connecting Crimea to mainland Russia.
A senior Ukrainian military officer accused Russia of staging explosions at the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant and blamed Ukraine in a false flag attack.
General Oleksii Gromov, the chief of the Main Operations Department of the General Staff of Ukraine, pointed to Moscow’s repeated unsubstantiated claims that Ukraine was planning to detonate a radioactive dirty bomb as a possible signal that Moscow was planning explosions at the facility, the largest in Europe, plan nuclear power plant.
Russia took control of the Zaporizhia plant in the first days of the invasion. Russia and Ukraine have accused each other of attacking the plant, whose reactors were shut down after sustained shelling.
Gromov also accused Thursday that Russian forces may have staged explosions on residential buildings in the city of Kherson before withdrawing from the city “to cause critical damage to the infrastructure of the areas retaken from Ukraine.”
The war in Ukraine and the resulting energy crisis is likely to cause global demand for fossil fuels to peak or flatten, largely due to falling Russian exports, according to a report released Thursday by the Paris-based International Energy Agency .
“Today’s energy crisis is a shock of unprecedented breadth and complexity,” said the IEA when it released its annual report, the World Energy Outlook.
According to the report, this is forcing the world’s more advanced economies to accelerate structural shifts towards renewable energy sources. ___
Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
