From March 30 to 31, Ukraine suffered another night of Russian bombing, with drones and missiles targeting civilian locations in the south of the country, the Ukrainian military said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky promised that his country will "endure" despite the new Russian attack.
Russia has recently increased its attacks on Ukrainian energy facilities, with significant damage reported, raising fears in Ukraine of a repeat of the blackouts they experienced in the winter of 2022-2023. , when Russia targeted Ukraine's energy infrastructure, causing frequent blackouts.
Ukraine's largest private energy company, DTEK, announced on March 30 that five of its six power plants had been damaged or destroyed with 80 percent of production capacity lost, and that repairs could take up to 18 months.
"Now there is not a night or a day when Russian terror does not try to break our lives. Last night they again fired missiles and 'shahid' drones at people. But we defend ourselves, we endure, our spirit does not falter and knows that it is possible to avert death. Life can prevail ", Zelenski wrote in a post on social networks on March 31, on the occasion of the Easter holidays.
Earlier, the Ukrainian Air Force announced that Russia had launched a total of 16 missiles and 11 drones at Ukraine in a night attack. The air force was said to have managed to destroy nine drones and nine missiles.
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One person was killed in a Russian overnight strike on energy infrastructure in the Lviv region of western Ukraine, local officials said.
The latest strikes damaged the energy infrastructure in the Odesa region and an agricultural plant in the Kherson region. Eight Shahid drones were shot down in the Odesa region by Ukrainian air defense units, authorities said, and debris from the falling drones caused a fire at a local power plant. Power outages were recorded in the region. The fire was extinguished, and there were no injuries, the army announced.
In the Kherson region, the Ukrainian military said a Russian airstrike hit a dormant agricultural facility. There are no reports of injuries.
The new Russian attack comes after it was announced on March 31 that Russian President Vladimir Putin had signed a decree on routine spring conscription, calling up 150.000 citizens for military service.
In July, the lower house of the Russian parliament voted to raise the maximum age at which men can be mobilized from 27 to 30. The new law took effect on January 1, 2024.
Compulsory military service has long been a sensitive issue in Russia, where many men go to great lengths to avoid being handed conscription papers twice a year.
Conscripts cannot legally be deployed to fight outside Russia and were exempted from a limited mobilization in 2022 that brought together at least 300.000 men with previous military training to fight in Ukraine - although some conscripts were mistakenly sent to the front
In September, Putin signed an order to call up 130.000 people for the fall campaign, and last spring Russia planned to recruit 147.000 people.
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