On the evening of Sunday 11 September, a general alert was announced in nearly all the regions of Ukraine. A mass launch of precision missiles by the Russian Black and Caspian Sea fleets had just been detected.
This is not the first occasion in this war on which such an attack has happened. The difference is, the aggressor this time deliberately aimed for critical civilian infrastructure – and hit it. Within an hour, reports of explosions and fires were followed by power-failures in several regions, with two of them, Kharkiv and Donetsk, suffering complete blackouts. The water supply was disrupted, the Kharkiv metro ground to a halt (passengers had to leave the trains and make their way through the tunnels on foot), and in Poltava several trolleybuses caught fire due to fluctuations in voltage.
The long-term damage is yet to be assessed. Yet according to Kharkiv mayor Igor Terekhov, electricity and water had been restored by Monday morning, and even the city transport system was back to running as normal.
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