Russia has sent Ukrainians racing for cover with drone attacks and a rush-hour missile barrage, killing 11 people, the day after Kyiv secured Western pledges of dozens of modern battlefield tanks to try to push back the Russian invasion.
Moscow reacted with fury to the German and American announcements, and has in the past responded to apparent Ukrainian successes with massed air strikes that have left millions without light, heat or water.
The Ukrainian military said it had shot down all 24 drones sent overnight by Russia, including 15 around the capital, and 47 of 55 Russian missiles.
Air raid alarms sounded across Ukraine as people headed to work. In the capital, crowds took cover in underground metro stations.
Emergency officials said the drone and missile attacks killed 11 people and wounded 11 more.
Ukrainian Energy Minister Herman Halushchenko said energy facilities were again targeted on Thursday by Russian forces who were “trying to cause a systemic failure in the energy system of Ukraine”.
He acknowledged that some energy facilities had been hit, resulting in emergency outages, and repair teams were working to restore power supply as quickly as possible.
Maksym Marchenko, the governor of southern Ukraine’s Odesa region, said energy infrastructure facilities were damaged in his and several other regions, causing “significant problems with electricity supply”.
The attacks on Odesa came just as the French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna was arriving for a visit to the Black Sea port, designated a “World Heritage in Danger” site on Wednesday by the UN cultural agency UNESCO.
Ms Colonna was due to meet her Ukrainian counterpart, Dmytro Kuleba, to discuss humanitarian and military aid and potentially whether France might join its NATO allies in supplying Ukraine with battle tanks, in this case its own Leclerc model.
Both Moscow and Kyiv, which have so far relied on Soviet-era T-72 tanks, are expected to mount new ground offensives in spring.
Ukraine has been asking for hundreds of modern tanks in the hope of using them to break Russian defensive lines and recapture occupied territory in the south and east.