Russia escalates attacks on key Ukrainian region

2025-12-22 21:57:00, Kosova & Bota CNA

Russia has intensified its attacks on Ukraine's southern Odessa region, causing widespread power outages and threatening the region's naval infrastructure. Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Oleksiy Kuleba said Moscow was carrying out "systematic" attacks in the region. Last week, he warned that the focus of the war could shift to Odessa.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said the repeated attacks were an attempt by Moscow to block Ukraine's access to naval logistics.

Earlier in December, Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened to cut off Ukraine's access to the sea in retaliation for drone attacks on tankers of Russia's "shadow fleet" in the Black Sea.

The "shadow fleet" is a term that refers to the hundreds of tankers used by Russia to circumvent Western sanctions imposed after its full invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

On Sunday night in the Odessa region, strikes cut off electricity to 120,000 people and caused a fire at a major port that destroyed dozens of containers of flour and vegetable oil. It was the latest in a series of hundreds of strikes that have disrupted power supplies in the region for days and caused several fatalities. Last week, a ballistic missile attack on the Pivdenniy port east of Odessa killed eight people and wounded at least 30 others. Another attack earlier in the week killed a woman traveling in a car with her three children and temporarily cut off the Odessa region’s only bridge connecting Ukraine and Moldova.

Zelensky indicated that a new air force commander for the region would be selected soon after the dismissal of Dmytro Karpenko over the weekend.

The port of Odessa has always been key to the country's economy. The city is the third largest in Ukraine after Kiev and Kharkiv. It now has strategic importance as other ports in the Zaporizhzhia, Kherson and Mykolayiv regions are inaccessible to Ukraine due to the Russian occupation.

Despite the war, Ukraine remains one of the world's leading exporters of wheat and corn. Since August 2023, Odessa has been the starting point of a key corridor that allows it to export grain abroad, following the coastlines of Romania and Bulgaria before reaching Turkey.

Zelensky, who has previously accused Russia of "sowing chaos" on the people of Odessa, said "everyone should see that without pressure on Russia, they have no intention of truly ending their aggression." His comments came as the latest round of U.S.-led diplomatic efforts wrapped up in Miami. The U.S. met separately with Ukrainian and Russian delegations, with the meetings producing optimistic statements but no clear progress toward bringing an end to Moscow's nearly four-year war with Ukraine any closer.

US President Donald Trump's special envoy, Steve Witkoff, said he and his Ukrainian counterpart, Rustem Umerov, had been working to "align positions" on a 20-point draft peace plan presented by Ukraine earlier this month. The plan is an alternative to a proposal presented by the US in November, which was seen as favorable to Moscow.

Before Russian envoy Kirill Dmitriev returned to Moscow from Florida, Kremlin foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov told reporters that European and Ukrainian changes to the peace proposal would not improve the chances of achieving peace.

On Monday, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov accused EU countries of having a "strong aspiration" to hinder potential Russia-US agreements on Ukraine and "in general to prevent Russian-US relations from improving."

He also said European countries were "obsessed with a maniacal fear" of a Russian attack. Russia was ready to confirm in a legal agreement that it had no intention of attacking either the EU or NATO, Ryabkov added, echoing earlier comments by Putin.

"We never planned to attack Europe, but if they want to hear it from us, let's do it, we will express it in writing," Putin said in November./CNA, translated by BBC