Ukrainian officials across the country reported a wave of Russian airstrikes pounding residential areas and cities following a series of significant losses for the Russian military in recent weeks.
Air raid sirens blared Tuesday in Lviv, Kryvyi Rih and Kharkiv, among other cities. The mayor of Lviv, Andriy Sadovyi, tweeted part of the city was without power.
Videos of strikes shared on social media showed buildings burning after the rocket strikes.
In the city of Zhytomyr in northwestern Ukraine, Russia knocked out power after two missile strikes pounded the city’s energy grid, according to Ukrainian media.
Ukraine’s Centre for Strategic Communication and Information Security reported blackouts in Rivne and Khmelnytskyi in the west.
“Russia is not targeting the military,” the agency tweeted. “It is targeting civilians.”
The strikes come just days after Ukrainian troops reclaimed the city of Kherson in the country’s southern region in a major victory for Ukraine.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the liberated city on Monday after the Russian military retreated from the area. The president vowed that the victory would be the beginning of the end of the war in Ukraine.
“Of course, it is difficult, it is a long and hard path,” Zelensky said in an address Monday. “No one gives anything away so easily. The price of this war is high. People were wounded, a large number of people died.”
“We believe that they fled because our army surrounded the enemy, and they were in danger,” the Ukrainian leader said. “There were fierce battles, and the result is that today we are in the Kherson region.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin authorized mass strikes against Ukrainian civilian infrastructure last month in response to an explosion on a key bridge connected to the Crimean Peninsula.
Allies of Ukraine condemned the strikes at the time, saying that they amounted to a war crime.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.