Belgorod (Russia): power plant exploded, probably a missile

Belgorod, a Russian city located north of the Ukrainian border, not far from Kharkiv, has suffered repeated attacks by Ukrainian forces in the past 24 hours. "The governor of a Russian border region accused Ukraine of bombing an apartment building on Thursday, but a Kiev official said a stray Russian missile was to blame, in one of many attacks on Russian border towns," Reuters reported Thursday, also stating that "a school was damaged in a village near the border and that the top floor of an apartment building was hit in the city of Belgorod."

While this is not the first case of Ukrainian cross-border attacks (although Kiev has always denied it), the situation escalated on Friday with a night missile attack on the Belgorod thermal power plant, which plunged much of the city into darkness.

Unconfirmed images of a key power plant in Belgorod, Russia, burning after a missile attack.

If this is indeed the result of a confirmed Ukrainian missile strike, it will mark a massive escalation in the past week of multiple severe escalations, including the attack on the Kerch Strait bridge, as this is a major hit on Russian soil. .

Does this mark the beginning of a Ukrainian attack on Russian energy infrastructure? Earlier this week, President Vladimir Putin announced the start of an aggressive attack on the Ukrainian energy grid.

Another question remains: Are Ukrainian forces using longer-range missiles transferred from Western allies? If so, a massive response from Moscow could be unleashed, despite Putin, in an earlier speech on Friday, signaling that he is not planning further large-scale airstrikes in Ukraine for the time being.

The moment a power facility in Russia's Belgorod was hit. pic.twitter.com/HSRvBXf64C

– Leonid ХВ Ragozin (@leonidragozin) October 14, 2022

The New York Times wrote that Russia escalated Monday through Tuesday attacks against Ukraine's energy infrastructure:

Electricity was out in large swathes of Ukraine on Monday, as President Vladimir V. Putin said Russia has deliberately targeted Ukraine's energy system in a series of attacks across the country in response to an attack on a critical bridge linking Russia to Crimea, which Putin blamed on Ukraine.

The flurry of missile attacks hit more than 10 cities, from Kharkiv to Kiev, with the aim of paralyzing the country's energy system as winter approaches. Ukrainian emergency services said five regions – Lviv, Poltava, Sumy, Kharkiv and Ternopil – were without electricity. Internet and heating outages were also reported.

The war is having a very bad escalation, it does not stop, on the contrary it is spreading more and more, involving more and more wounded. A denial to those who believed that wars could only be won with special operations.

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The article Belgorod (Russia): power plant exploded, probably a missile comes from ScenariEconomici.it .

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This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/belgorod-esplosione/ on Fri, 14 Oct 2022 19:46:16 +0000.