Russia escalates attacks on key areas of Odessa, Ukraine

Russia has stepped up strikes in Ukraine’s southern Odessa region, causing widespread power outages and threatening the region’s maritime 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 “may have turned to Odessa.”

President Volodymyr Zelensky said the multiple attacks were an attempt by Moscow to deny Ukraine access to maritime logistics lanes.

In early December, Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened to cut off Ukraine’s access to the sea in retaliation for drone attacks on Russian “shadow fleet” oil tankers in the Black Sea.

The term “shadow fleet” refers to the hundreds of oil tankers used by Russia to bypass Western sanctions following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

A strike in the Odessa region on Sunday night left 120,000 people without power and sparked a fire at a major port that destroyed dozens of containers containing flour and vegetable oil.

It is the latest in a series of hundreds of strikes that have disrupted the region’s power supply for days and caused multiple casualties.

Last week, a ballistic missile attack hit the port of Pivdeny east of Odessa, killing eight people and injuring at least 30 others.

Another attack earlier this week killed a woman traveling by car with her three children and temporarily severed the Odessa region’s only bridge connecting Ukraine to Moldova.

Zelensky said a new air force commander for the region would be chosen soon, following the weekend dismissal of Dmytro Kapenko.

The port of Odessa has always been key to the country’s economy. The city is the third largest city in Ukraine, after Kyiv and Kharkiv. It is now of strategic importance since other ports in the Zaporozhye, Kherson and Nikolaev regions are inaccessible to Ukraine due to Russian occupation.

Despite the war, Ukraine remains one of the world’s largest exporters of wheat and corn.

Since August 2023, Odessa has been the starting point of an important corridor that allows it to export grain abroad, along the Romanian and Bulgarian coastlines and then to Türkiye.

Zelensky, who had previously accused Russia of “sowing the seeds of chaos” to the people of Odessa, said, “Everyone must see that without putting pressure on Russia, they have no intention of truly ending the aggression.”

His comments came as the latest round of U.S.-led diplomatic efforts concluded in Miami. The United States met with Ukrainian and Russian delegations separately, and the meetings issued optimistic statements but produced no significant progress, bringing Moscow’s nearly four-year war against Ukraine closer to an end.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Vitkov said he and Ukrainian President Rustem Umerov have “coordinated positions” on the draft 20-point peace plan Ukraine presented earlier this month. The plan is an alternative to a U.S. proposal last November that 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 revisions to the peace proposal would not increase the chances of peace.

On Monday, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov accused EU countries of a “firm desire” to undermine a potential Russian-US deal on Ukraine and “generally prevent Russian-US relations from becoming healthier.”

He also said European countries were “crazy” fearful of a Russian attack. Ryabkov added that Russia was prepared to confirm in a legal agreement that it had no intention of attacking the EU or NATO, echoing Putin’s previous remarks.

“We never planned (to attack Europe), but if they want to listen to us, then let’s do it, we will put it in writing,” Putin said in November.