A drone attack damaged an industrial facility in Russia while Russian strikes left hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian families without electricity, officials from the two countries said on November 1. RFE/RL reported the attacks as Ukraine faced further disruption to its energy network with cold weather setting in.
Gleb Nikitin, governor of Russia’s Nizhny Novgorod region, said an overnight attack caused significant damage at an industrial enterprise in the Kstovo district. He said more than 100 drones were destroyed and that no casualties had been reported at that point.
Ukrainian media identified the possible targets as the Lukoil refinery in Kstovo and the Novogorkovskaya combined heat and power plant. RFE/RL said it could not independently verify that information.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said overnight Russian attacks hit substations, transformers and power lines in Dnipro, Vinnytsia, Zhytomyr and Khmelnytsky. Repair crews were working across the affected areas, he said, but hundreds of thousands of families remained without power.
Ukraine’s military separately reported that Russia attacked with 433 drones on November 1, launched from locations in Russia and Russian-occupied Donetsk.
The exchanges followed an October 31 attack that Ukraine’s military said targeted the state-owned Kombinat Kamensky chemical and defense enterprise in Russia’s Rostov region using drones and Neptune missile systems. Zelenskyy said that attack caused damage worth tens of millions of dollars.