Nine killed in Russian strikes as Ukraine prepares for a hard winter
Zelenskyy says nearly 500 drones were sent against Ukrainian targets from early morning. Three people were killed in private cars in Kramatorsk within 90 minutes.
Russian airstrikes killed nine people, injured dozens and damaged buildings and infrastructure across Ukraine on Saturday, as Kyiv prepares for what it has called a very difficult winter.
The civilian death toll has risen sharply over the past two months as Russia has intensified attacks on power plants and other infrastructure.
The scale of Saturday
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, writing on Telegram, said Russia had deployed nearly 500 drones against Ukrainian targets since early morning.
He described the strikes as a shift in the war's centre of gravity. The Russians, he wrote, have expanded the war away from the front, "where they have no success, into the economy", with tactics he called as basic as it gets — destroying every site that could help people cope with the conditions of war.
"Russia wants to kill the Ukrainian economy and break our resistance," he wrote.
Kramatorsk
The city council in Kramatorsk, one of the frontline cities Russia is seeking to capture, said Russian forces attacked private cars, killing three people in three separate incidents within a 90-minute period. Four people were injured.
"These are not military targets," the council said. "They are ordinary civilian cars. People were going about their business."
Three separate strikes on vehicles inside an hour and a half describes a pattern of attack on moving civilian traffic rather than a single misdirected munition.
Odesa
Russian overnight strikes also hit Odesa, damaging buildings in the coastal city.
The wider exchange
The strikes are not one-directional. Ukraine has hit energy facilities and warehouses in distant parts of Russia, and both sides have targeted each other's shipping.
That last element connects this war to the disruption in global shipping and energy markets that has run through the year.
Why winter is the frame
Attacks on power plants have a different arithmetic in October than in June. A grid damaged in summer can be patched before it is needed; the same damage in autumn arrives weeks before heating demand peaks.
Zelenskyy's framing — destroying every site that could help people cope — describes a campaign aimed at that calendar rather than at the front line.
Ukraine has faced winter campaigns against its energy system before. What his statement claims is new is the scale and the explicit targeting of the economy rather than of military capability.
The day count
Saturday was day 1,663 of the war.
What the briefing does not settle
The nine deaths are the confirmed toll at the time of the briefing, and the number of injured is given as dozens rather than a figure. Neither the total damage to infrastructure nor the extent of any resulting power loss is stated.
