Russia hits nine Ukrainian regions

Russian attacks across Ukraine killed at least eight people, wounded 60 and disrupted electricity supply for more than a million people, according to Ukrainian officials and the Energy Ministry.

The strikes hit nine regions and reached well beyond the front line. In Kharkiv, Governor Oleh Syniehubov said attacks on three districts killed a 71-year-old woman and a 58-year-old man and injured 12 others. In Kramatorsk, a city close to the fighting in Donetsk region, officials reported two deaths. Two more people were killed in Dnipropetrovsk region.

In Volyn, on Ukraine’s border with Poland, Governor Roman Romaniuk said a drone strike on a food-processing facility killed one person and injured eight. Drones also hit a customs terminal in Kovel, on a main road linking Kyiv to Poland, setting about 10 trucks on fire. In Rivne, regional governor Oleksandr Koval said drones struck a large shopping centre and other sites, killing one person and wounding seven.

The scale matters because it shows the target was not only military positions or one stretch of the grid. Ukraine’s Energy Ministry said repair crews restored electricity to more than a million people who had lost power. Even so, officials in Volyn said about 370,000 households were cut off, and supply had been restored to at least 100,000 of them. Lutsk mayor Andriy Razumovskyi said the blackout in the regional capital could last at least 24 hours.

That damage landed as Russia’s military chief told President Vladimir Putin that the armed forces had assigned the assets needed to continue the aerial campaign against Ukraine’s energy system. The statement does not prove that every site hit formed part of a centrally announced push. It does place the power cuts inside an openly declared strategy.

The United Nations said civilian harm in Ukraine has risen sharply. UN human rights monitors recorded at least 328 civilians killed and 2,105 wounded in September 2026, an 85 percent increase from September 2025. Between January and September 2026, they recorded 2,570 killed and 15,211 wounded, almost 60 percent more than in the same period a year earlier. Danielle Bell, who heads the UN human rights monitoring mission in Ukraine, said the first two weeks of October were among the deadliest periods for civilians in years.