Russia hits Kyiv energy sites for a second night as 600,000 lose power and Zelensky says there was no warning

Russia's autumn campaign against Ukraine's power system ran through a second consecutive night, and this time Kyiv says the warning that usually comes from its partners never arrived.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russian forces used 39 ballistic missiles and more than 120 attack drones and loitering munitions overnight against energy and critical infrastructure in Kyiv, the Kyiv region and Kharkiv. The main target in the capital was thermal power plant No. 4. A strike on a nine story residential building in Kyiv's Desnianskyi district killed three people and injured more than 20, according to the Kyiv City Military Administration, and Ukrainian officials reported four more people killed in Kharkiv. Zelensky said the attacks damaged equipment at 26 power system facilities and four oil and gas facilities, and left at least 600,000 people without electricity as of Wednesday, with outages likely to spread.

The political charge sits inside the military one. The strikes hit the very infrastructure covered by the energy ceasefire President Trump announced on Sunday, which Ukraine says it has honored by holding its fire on Russian energy targets while Moscow has not confirmed the agreement at all. Zelensky said the facts show Russia does not consider itself bound by what the president of the United States said, and called the strike deliberate and demonstrative in its scale. He asked Washington and the world to respond forcefully, with stronger sanctions on Moscow and more air defense for Kyiv.

For the second night running, Zelensky said, Ukraine received no advance warning of the ballistic launches from Western partners. Ukraine's air force has said its systems lacked launch data for the earlier attack as well. Missile experts note that the American space based infrared warning system has no real European substitute, which makes any gap in that sharing a gap Ukraine cannot fill on its own. President Trump has denied any intelligence cutoff, and his press secretary said she would look into the matter.

Ukraine answered in kind overnight. A Ukrainian drone strike hit a data centre belonging to Sberbank, Russia's largest bank, in Balakovo in the Saratov region. Sberbank deputy chairman Alexander Vedyakhin confirmed the attack and said banking systems and customer services were working normally. The regional governor said a drone attack on Balakovo killed one person early on Wednesday. Earlier this month the Russian technology company Yandex reported at least three drone attacks on its own data centres. The picture is an illustration of a blacked out city, not a photograph from Kyiv.