• 4 months ago

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Transcript
00:00For more on the story, we can now cross to France 24's Gulliver.
00:03Craig, he joins us live from Kiev.
00:05Gulliver, what indication do we have at the moment
00:07at just how effective this Russian attack has been,
00:11how much damage has been done?
00:15Well, as usual, the authorities are quite tight-lipped
00:18about exactly what damage has been done and where.
00:21I'm at the northern edge of Kiev,
00:23and behind me is the road that goes to the dam at Vyshgorod.
00:27It's a hydroelectric power station.
00:29As you can perhaps see, the road is closed.
00:32It's clear that this hydroelectric power station
00:35was one of the targets.
00:36A video has been released of a missile
00:38falling into the Kiev Sea, as it's known,
00:41the reservoir that the dam holds in above the city.
00:45But it seems that wasn't the only missile
00:48and that there is some damage.
00:50That, of course, always leads to fears
00:52that Kiev could be flooded, that the dam could burst.
00:54That's actually highly unlikely.
00:56It's very, very hard to burst a strong dam like that
00:58by firing on it from a distance.
01:00But putting the hydroelectric power generation capacity
01:03completely out of action, that is absolutely possible.
01:06And that was probably the Russians' aim,
01:09because according to the Ukrainian authorities,
01:12this was an attack aimed principally
01:15at the country's electricity infrastructure.
01:17All over the country, different power stations,
01:19different parts of the electricity grid were hit.
01:22Also, though, notably in Lutsk,
01:25in the far northwest of Ukraine,
01:27residential apartment buildings were hit,
01:30perhaps by debris falling
01:32or perhaps by the projectile missing its target.
01:35One person is reported dead there.
01:37In Kiev, private homes were damaged,
01:39one of them completely reduced to rubble.
01:42Several people reported injured there,
01:44including a five-month-old baby.
01:46And many cities in Ukraine, including Lutsk, Zhytomyr
01:50and parts of Kiev are this morning completely,
01:53well, this afternoon now, sorry, without electricity.
01:56So, Golovor, there's been expectations of a major attack
02:00from Russia on Ukraine for weeks now,
02:01especially since Ukraine's incursion
02:03into Russia's Kursk region.
02:05What does it say that Russia is able to mount
02:07this massive missile attack
02:08on Ukraine's energy infrastructure,
02:10but seemingly unable to dislodge Ukrainian troops
02:13from its own territory?
02:16Well, they're two completely different things.
02:18The Russians have been building up missile capacity.
02:21They've got new drones,
02:22in addition to the Iranian Shahed ones,
02:24which allows them to fly the drones around for longer.
02:28I believe the alert is actually still in place
02:30for Kiev, the air alert,
02:32because drones are still flying around.
02:35And there's a limit to how much
02:36the Ukrainian air defenses can do
02:38to protect the electricity infrastructure.
02:42But it looks very, very bad for the coming winter,
02:44because already I was talking to DTEK,
02:46one of the main electricity companies,
02:48and they were saying that even in the best-case scenario
02:50where there would be no further strikes,
02:52this was before this morning's attack,
02:55they were looking to be providing people
02:57with electricity for fewer hours in the day
03:00than the hours in the day
03:01that they would not have electricity
03:03throughout this winter.
03:04Presumably now those already pessimistic expectations
03:07are going to be revised even further downwards.
03:10All right.
03:10Another rough winter perhaps in store for Ukraine
03:14once again as Russia targets energy infrastructure there.
03:16That's France 24.
03:17It's Gulliver Craig from Kiev.
03:18Thanks very much.

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