Russia strikes cities across Ukraine, targeting the country’s energy infrastructure

Russia strikes cities across Ukraine, targeting the country’s energy infrastructure

Russia conducted a “massive” attack against Ukraine’s energy infrastructure on Thursday, firing nearly 200 missiles and drones and leaving more than a million households without power, Ukrainian officials said.

Ukrainian officials said it was the 11th major strike on the energy system since March, and it was Russia’s second major aerial attack on Ukraine’s power grid in less than two weeks. It amplified fears that the Kremlin aims to cripple the country’s power generation capacity before winter.

“Attacks on energy facilities are happening all over Ukraine,” Energy Minister Herman Halushchenko said in a post on Facebook. He added that emergency power outages were implemented nationwide.

At least 1 million people across three western regions of the country were without power, officials said.

Moscow struck in response to recent Ukraine strikes on Russian territory with U.S. medium-range ATACMS missiles, Russian President Vladimir Putin told told members of a security alliance made up of ex-Soviet states in Astana, Kazakhstan, on Thursday. He said Russia’s future targets could include “decision-making centres” in Kyiv.

“Tonight we conducted a comprehensive strike using 90 missiles of similar classes and 100 drones,” said Putin. “Seventeen targets were hit.

“These are military facilities, defence industry facilities and their support systems. Let me repeat once again: these strikes on our part also took place in response to the ongoing strikes on Russian territory with American ATACMS missiles.”

Cluster munitions used, Zelenskyy says

Around half of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure has been destroyed during the almost three years of war with Russia, and rolling electricity blackouts are common. Kyiv’s Western allies have sought to help Ukraine protect power generation with air defence systems and funds for rebuilding.

Russia in previous years has targeted Ukraine’s electricity generation, aiming to deny civilians critical heating and drinking water supplies during the bitter winter months and break Ukrainian spirits. The attacks also seek to hobble Ukraine’s defence industry that is now producing missiles, drones and armoured vehicles, among other military assets.

Ukraine’s military said Russia used 91 missiles and 97 drones in Thursday’s attack.

The air force said it had shot down 79 missiles and downed 35 drones, while 62 drones were “lost,” meaning they had likely been disrupted by electronic warfare.

In some regions, Kalibr cruise missiles with cluster munitions smashed into civilian targets, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, calling it “an insidious escalation.” Cluster munitions release numerous small bombs over a wide area, making them dangerous to civilians both during and after an attack.

Ukrainian officials have warned recently that Russia was stockpiling cruise and ballistic missiles, presumably for another pre-winter aerial campaign against Ukraine’s power grid. Ukrainian officials have in the past accused Russia of “weaponizing winter.”

The war has been going in Russia’s favour in recent months as its bigger army uses its advantages in manpower and equipment to push Ukrainian forces backward in eastern areas, though its offensive has been slow and costly.

Explosions were reported in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Rivne, Khmelnytskyi, Lutsk, and many other cities in central and western Ukraine.

Power outages across country

The head of the Lviv region in western Ukraine, Maksym Kozytskyi, said the attack left more than half a million households without electricity.

Over 280,000 households in the northwestern Rivne region were without electricity because of the attack, according to regional Gov. Oleksandr Koval. Running water supplies were also patchy in affected areas. Some schools in Rivne city switched to online classes.

There were also strikes on the bordering Volyn region, where 215,000 households had no electricity, regional head Ivan Rudnytskyi said. All critical infrastructure that lost power was switched to generators.

Energy infrastructure was also targeted in the western Ivano-Frankivsk region, local officials said. Air defences were activated there, and emergency power outages were introduced.

Local officials ordered the opening of “points of invincibility” — shelter-type places where people can charge their phones and other electrical devices and get refreshments during blackouts.

In Kyiv, where the air raid alert lasted over nine hours, missile debris fell in one neighbourhood, local officials said. No casualties were reported.

Published at Thu, 28 Nov 2024 09:58:31 +0000

Canada seen by some as cautionary tale for U.K.’s assisted dying bill

Esther Rantzen says she doesn’t have the strength to fly to Canada to seek lasting relief from her ever-advancing cancer, but she would if she could.

“I love Canada, but I think I will go to Switzerland and seek an assisted death if the illness starts to progress faster,” Rantzen, 84, said from her cottage in the New Forest in southern England. 

“It was named the New Forest a thousand years ago by one of William the Conqueror’s sons. So we are quite a conservative country…. If we regard a thousand years as being quite new, you can see why it’s taking us a bit of time to reform our current law.”

Rantzen is referring to what’s being called a once-in-a-generation political and moral decision for the United Kingdom’s members of Parliament.

On Friday, MPs will have the opportunity to debate and vote on whether terminally ill adults in England and Wales with fewer than six months to live and the assistance of a doctor should have the right to end their lives. 

Bill 12, or the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, says anyone who wants to end their life must be older than 18, have the mental capacity to make that choice and be expected to die within six months. From there, interested adults must make two separate declarations, witnessed and signed, about their wish to die and receive approval from two independent doctors.

A High Court judge would then hear from at least one of the doctors and be permitted to question the dying person before making their ruling, at which point a doctor would prepare a substance for the individual, who would administer it themselves. 

Currently, assisted suicide, as it’s called in the U.K., is illegal and punishable by up to 14 years in prison.

Learning from Canada’s example

Despite Bill 12 being modelled extensively after assisted dying laws in the state of Oregon in the U.S., Canada has found itself being held up as a prime example of what not to do by those who oppose the legislation. 

Some people see Canada’s expanding provisions for medical assistance in dying (MAID) as an example of what they feel could go wrong if the legislation is passed. Others are saying the strictness of the language in the British bill will safeguard England and Wales against going the way of Canada’s experience.

“We’ve got the benefit in this country of looking at what other countries have done,” Labour MP Kim Leadbeater told ITV’s Good Morning Britain. 

“And I’m not looking at the model that is going on in Canada. I’m looking at those other jurisdictions where this is done well and in some cases it’s been done for a long time, very well, and the criteria have never been extended.”

MAID was legalized across Canada in 2016 for those whose death was “reasonably foreseeable.”

Expanded in 2021, the law as Canadians know it today no longer requires the person applying to have a terminal diagnosis in order to be eligible. 

For critics of the U.K.’s bill, which has divided opinions across the political spectrum, the concerns range from a lack of safeguards to lawmakers not being given enough time to review its language.

Leadbeater introduced the bill to the House of Commons on Oct. 16 and published its full text on Nov. 11.

“At the heart of this is choice, it’s autonomy. It’s addressing a status quo which is not fit for purpose and it’s the rights of those terminally ill people who do not have long left to live just having the choice that I believe they deserve,” Leadbeater told the BBC on Nov. 12.

Recently, U.K. Justice Minister Shabana Mahmood wrote a letter to constituents calling it a “slippery slope to death on demand” and strongly voiced her plans to vote against the bill, despite calls from Prime Minister Keir Starmer for cabinet neutrality. 

Tanni Grey-Thompson, a Paralympic athlete and member of the House of Lords, says her concerns lie with the message she believes this legislation will send to the disabled community, should it pass.

“I worry about the impact on disabled people who don’t feel they will have a choice but to end their lives because the U.K. is not necessarily a great place for disabled people to live,” says Grey-Thompson.

People with disabilities in the U.K. continue to face discrimination, according to a 2023 report by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), which found persistent barriers to access to transport, the justice system and sporting and cultural venues.

The language in the law being proposed specifies assisted dying would only be afforded to the terminally ill, which does not include someone with a mental disorder or physical disability.

But Grey-Thompson says laws can be changed. 

“We’ve seen in places like Canada, it’s changed quite a lot…. It’s possible for a huge number of people to potentially ask for this.”

She adds the widening of the law in Canada is concerning. 

Currently, Canada’s Bill C-14 does not require a terminal diagnosis and is open to those plagued by “physical or psychological suffering.”

However, expansion of Canada’s MAID program for those with a mental illness has been delayed until March 2027.

“I think we just have to be careful what we wish for,” said Grey-Thompson. “I don’t want people to suffer. I watched my parents die, it was pretty miserable. But their experience has made me think about how we need to do things in a better way.”

When will it take effect?

Ahead of the U.K.’s general election this past summer, a poll by a London-based research consultancy showed that when asked to choose the top priorities for the new Labour government, only four per cent included “legalizing assisted suicide.” 

And yet, a public opinion poll conducted in the weeks following the publication of Britain’s Bill 12 demonstrated “73 per cent of Britons believe that — in principle — assisted dying should be legal in the U.K.” 

MPs will vote in the House of Commons on Friday, at which point, if the bill passes, it will be forwarded to a public bill committee for consideration. Evidence could be submitted for or against the proposed legislation from campaign groups, religious organizations and medical professionals.

Further obstacles to the bill take shape in the form of a third reading, followed by a vote in the House of Lords, all of which means it could be years before the first person in the U.K. is able to legally apply for assisted dying. 

It’s a timeline that Rantzen fears will outlive her.

Rantzen, who set up a health line for children in 1986, stepped down from her post as president of Childline in 2023 after being diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer.

She said she supports this bill because it gives people who are terminally ill the right to a “good death.”

“Choice is what it’s all about, whether you have a choice to shorten your death. Not your life, but your death.… That choice is what Canadians have.”

Published at Thu, 28 Nov 2024 09:00:00 +0000