Dec. 23 (UPI) -- Russian forces unleashed more than 650 drones and 38 missiles across Ukraine overnight, killing at least three people, including a young child, injuring 12 others and leaving many regions without power.
The airborne assault targeted 13 of Ukraine's 24 provinces, killing one person in the Kyiv region, one in the Khmelnytskyi region and a four-year-old girl was killed in the western Zhytomyr region, President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a post on X.
The Energy Ministry said in an online update that entire provinces, including Rivne, Ternopil and Khmelnytskyi in the west, were almost completely without electricity after damage forced network providers to implement emergency power outages.
DTEK, Ukraine's largest electricity production and distribution company, said it had introduced emergency power cuts, including in the capital province and Kyiv itself, as well as in Dnipropetrovsk, the country's industrial heartland.
The Vinnytsia, Chernihiv, Zhytomyr, Kharkiv and Donetsk regions were also affected while engineers in Odesa Oblast, in the southwest, were continuing to work to try to restore power to more than 120,000 residents after fresh strikes on Monday knocked out two power plants and destroyed a third.
