Russian attacks on Ukraine kill five civilians, damage power grid - Kyiv

By Serhiy Chalyi

ZAPORIZHZHIA, Ukraine (Reuters) - Russian attacks overnight and on Wednesday killed at least five civilians in Ukraine and damaged the power grid in the northeastern city of Kharkiv, Ukrainian officials said.

Two civilians were killed in a morning missile strike on a residential building in the southeastern city of Zaporizhzhia, and a 31-year-old woman was killed in an attack on the village of Obukhivka in the central region of Dnipropetrovsk, they said.

A man and a woman were also killed in an overnight attack on the southern region of Kherson, regional governor Oleksandr Prokudin said on the Telegram messaging app.

Officials in Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-biggest city, said the local power grid was damaged in a Russian air strike and that outages were possible.

"The evil state continues to use terror and wage war on civilians. Russian terror must be defeated," President Volodymyr Zelenskiy wrote on Telegram.

He also posted a photo of a five-storey building in Zaporizhzhia with a gaping hole in the middle, its entrance destroyed, windows smashed and debris scattered around it.

Reuters television footage showed fire brigades working near the damaged house and empty buses stopping nearby.

A Moscow-installed official in part of the Zaporizhzhia region controlled by Russia since soon after last year's invasion blamed the strikes on Ukrainian forces. Moscow did not immediately comment but denies deliberately targeting civilians.

Yuriy Malashko, the regional governor, said six missiles had hit the industrial city. He also reported seven drone attacks on nearby villages and Russian artillery fire on settlements near the front line.

Russia has carried out frequent air strikes as Kyiv presses on with a counteroffensive in the south and east that has made only gradual progress.

Kyiv, which suffered multiple power outages because of Russian air strikes last winter, says it expects Moscow to increasingly focus its attacks on energy infrastructure as the second winter since its full-scale invasion approaches.

(Additional reporting by Olena Harmash and Pavel Polityuk in Kyiv and Lidia Kelly in Melbourne; Editing by Timothy Heritage)