Russia Hammers Major Ukraine City Transformer Station, Multiple Cities, ‘Ceasefire’ Is Over (2025)

Russian drones and artillery blasted transformers and electricity transformers in Kherson on Wednesday, ending a nearly month-long tacit agreement between Kyiv and Moscow not to hit each other’s power grids.

Oleksandr Prokudin, head of the southern Kherson regional defense command, said Russian shells and heavy kamikaze drones launched from the left (east) bank of the Dnipro River “have been massively attacking one of the key enterprises of our energy infrastructure for more than a day.”

“The occupiers mercilessly hit the facility that provides the city with electricity with artillery and drones [and] attacks with [unmanned aerial vehicles] UAVs are continuing today,” Produkin said in a statement released by his office.

Produkin said waves of Russian drones, intermixed with salvoes of long-range Russian artillery, targeted electricity production in the city repeatedly overnight, and “in the morning, the Russians achieved their goal by destroying the energy facility.”

Power outages were likely and city energy workers were “doing everything possible and impossible” to repair the damage, he said.

Russian munitions also hit residential areas of the city, badly damaging two multi-story apartment buildings and dozens of homes. Twelve people, including one child, were injured, and the Russian strikes seemed to target emergency response vehicles, Produkin said.

City news and information feeds on Wednesday morning showed buildings with their walls blown out, including a school in the riverside, Korabelny region. City air raid warning networks first reported the launch of Russian Shahed attack drones, from the Russia-occupied Crimea peninsula, shortly after 1 a.m.

Russian drone video published by the Kherson power company social media platform Trukha Kherson, on Tuesday evening, showed first-person-view (FPV) drones circling and then diving through jamming to hit a power transformer station in a central city district.

Kremlin strike planners, on Wednesday, paralleled the overnight attacks on civilian infrastructure against southern Kherson with waves of explosives-toting robot aircraft launched at the southwestern port city of Odesa, the south-eastern city of Dnipro, the northern city of Poltava, and the north-eastern city of Kharkiv. The Kremlin also sent bomber aircraft and artillery strikes against some cities.

The bloodiest attack was in the village of Marhanets, Dnipropetrovsk region, where Russian kamikaze drone hit a packed passenger bus, killing nine civilians and injuring 42, regional administration head Serhiy Lysak said in a statement.

Drone strikes also were reported in Cherkasy and Zaporizhzhia, where the headquarters of the aerospace company, Motor Sych, was reportedly targeted. Zaporizhzhia city authorities said one woman died and four people, two of them children, were injured in a glide bomb attack against a high-rise apartment building. Private homes also were damaged, news reports said.

In Kharkiv, social media showed Russian Shahed drones diving in to hit housing during the morning rush hour. Seven people were injured, regional administration head Oleh Sinehubov said in a statement. The worst overnight attack in the Kharkiv region, he said, was in the frontline city of Kupyansk, where Russian multiple artillery salvoes and four glide bombs pounded residential regions, hitting 55 buildings and injuring seven residents.

Overnight Russian operators launched a total of 137 attack drones against targets across Ukraine, of which 47 were decoys and 67 were shot down, a Ukrainian Air Force Monday morning statement said. Despite a US initiative kicked off in early March to reduce long-range attacks between Ukraine and Russia, the Kremlin has sent 100-200 attack drones against targets inside Ukraine almost nightly since then.

US President Donald J. Trump, following a lengthy telephone call with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, on March 19, announced he had negotiated a deal with the Kremlin that Russia and Ukraine would accept a partial ceasefire and not target energy infrastructure with long-range strikes.

Since then, Ukrainian strike planners have broken off an at-times highly successful campaigns targeting Russian oil and gas production and storage facilities. Kyiv’s most recent drone attack against Russia’s petroleum products infrastructure set afire the main refinery producing diesel and gas for central Russia – including about half of fuel supplies for the capital Moscow – for more than a week.

Oil and gas revenues are the most important source of cash for the Kremlin, accounting for about a third to half of total federal budget, the Reuters news agency reported on April 3. Damage by Ukrainian drones, combined with worsening global demand, contributed to 17% reduction in Russian oil and gas revenue in March alone, data published by Russia’s Finance Ministry in early April showed.

Russia on April 18 announced that the 30-day moratorium on energy infrastructure attacks had expired. At the time US senior negotiator with Russia, Steve Witkoff, told media that Washington was confident the Kremlin was looking for ways to de-escalate fighting.

Since the March 11 strike against the Moscow-region oil refinery and a critical pumping station in the adjacent Oryol region, Russian information platforms have not reported major Ukrainian attacks against Russian energy infrastructure.

The unofficial social media platform for Ukraine’s military, Operativny ZSU, in a Wednesday post, reported that Kyiv only began formal observation of the energy infrastructure ceasefire on March 24, and that a return by Ukrainian forces to long-range strikes against Russian energy infrastructure would not take place before April 24. Specific planned strike locations and timing are Ukrainian military secrets.