Electricity was out across wide swaths of Ukraine on Monday, as President Vladimir V. Putin said that Russia had deliberately targeted Ukraine’s energy system in a series of strikes across the country in response to an attack on a critical bridge linking Russia and Crimea that Mr. Putin blamed on Ukraine.
The flurry of missile strikes rained down on more than 10 cities from Kharkiv to Kyiv, a move that Ukrainian officials said was aimed crippling the nation’s energy system as winter nears.
Ukraine’s emergency services said that five regions — Lviv, Poltava, Sumy, Kharkiv and Ternopil — were without power. Internet and heating outages also were reported.
The cities of Lviv, Khmelnytsky, Zhytomyr and Kharkiv were all hit by strikes on Monday morning, leaving them without electricity and central heating. In the western city of Lviv, electrical outages forced the shutdown of central heating stations. In Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, the municipal waterworks shut down. Local officials in Kharkiv and Zhytomyr said electrical infrastructure had been hit.
The outages across Ukraine caused significant internet disruptions, with usage in some regions falling to about 25 percent of normal use, Netblocks, an internet monitoring agency said.
In a televised address on Monday, Mr. Putin said Russia had conducted a “mass strike with long-range, high-precision weaponry” against “energy, military command and communications facilities of Ukraine” in response to Saturday’s attack on the Kerch Bridge in Crimea.
“The morning is hard,” Mr. Zelensky said in a video address earlier on Monday morning, adding that Russian strikes had hit energy facilities in 12 regions across the country.
“They want panic and chaos, they want to destroy our energy system. They are hopeless,” he said.
The strikes were an escalation following weeks of long-range attacks on infrastructure that began last month as Russian forces sustained heavy losses on the battlefield.
