Kyiv/Kharkiv, Ukraine (Reuters) – In response to a quick attack by Ukrainian troops over the weekend that forced Russia to leave its main bastion in the Kharkiv area, Ukraine said that the Russian military attacked civilian infrastructure.
Officials in Ukraine said that the retaliatory attacks were aimed at water facilities and a thermal power station in Kharkiv. These attacks caused blackouts in many parts of the country.
“No military facilities. The goal is to keep people from having light and heat,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy wrote on Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) late on Sunday.
Moscow denies that its forces deliberately target civilians.
Zelenskiy has said that Ukraine’s offensive in the northeast could be a turning point in the six-month-old war. He also said that if Kyiv got better weapons, it could make more territorial gains over the winter.
In the worst loss for Moscow’s forces since they were pushed back from the outskirts of the capital Kiev in March, thousands of Russian soldiers left behind ammunition and equipment as they fled the city of Izium, which they had used as a logistics hub.
Related: European stock futures are going up; the offensive in Ukraine helps set a tone.
General Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, the top commander in Ukraine, said that the military had taken back control of more than 3,000 square kilometres (1,158 square miles) since the beginning of this month.
Politically, Ukraine’s gains are important for Zelenskiy because he wants to keep Europe united behind Ukraine by giving it weapons and money, even though an energy crisis is on the horizon this winter because Russia is cutting off gas supplies to Europe.
“COWARD REACTION”
In a regular update on Monday, the UK defence ministry said that it was likely that Russia had told its troops in occupied Kharkiv Oblast west of the Oskil River to leave.
The Ukraine’s General Staff said that in the past day, defence forces had driven the enemy out of more than 20 settlements.
In the village of Kozacha Lopan, which is north of Kharkiv and close to the Russian border, people hugged and shook hands with Ukrainian soldiers and local government officials.
“Kozacha (Lopan) is and always will be Ukraine,” said district mayor Vyacheslav Zadorenko in a video he posted on Facebook (NASDAQ:META). “There is no “Russian World” at all. Check out where the “Russian World” newspapers are lying around. “Glory to Ukraine, and glory to its military.”
Some pro-war commentators and Russian nationalists on social media were very angry that Moscow didn’t say much about the defeat or explain what happened in northeastern Ukraine. On Sunday, some people asked President Vladimir Putin to make changes right away to make sure that the war would be won in the end.
Zelenskiy said late on Sunday that Russian attacks caused total blackouts in the Kharkiv and Donetsk regions and partial blackouts in the Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovsk, and Sumy regions.
An adviser to the president of Ukraine, Mykhailo Podolyak, said that Kharkiv’s CHPP-5 electricity station, which is one of the biggest in Ukraine, had been hit.
“A cowardly response to its own army leaving the battlefield,” he wrote on Twitter.
Oleh Synehubov, the governor of Kharkiv, said that 80% of the water and electricity had been turned back on by Monday morning.
Oleksii Reznikov, Ukraine’s defence minister, told The Financial Times that Ukraine needed to protect newly taken territory from a possible Russian counterattack that would cut off Ukrainian supply lines.
Related: Ukraine’s Zelenskiy warns of a hard winter and says that the war is going well.
But he said that the offensive had gone much better than expected. He compared it to a “snowball rolling down a hill.”
He said, “It shows that Russia can be defeated.”
A nuclear reactor shuts down.
As the war moved into its 200th day, Ukraine shut down Europe’s biggest nuclear power plant’s last working reactor on Sunday to prevent a disaster. Fighting is still going on nearby.
Russia and Ukraine both say that the other is firing shells near the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia plant, which could cause radiation to leak out.
The International Atomic Energy Agency said that a backup power line to the plant had been fixed. This gave the plant the outside power it needed to shut down and prevent a meltdown.
In a phone call with Putin on Sunday, French President Emmanuel Macron told him that the plant’s security is at risk because Russian troops are in it, the French presidency said. A statement from the Kremlin says that Putin said Ukrainian forces were to blame.
France said on Sunday that it would sign a deal with Romania to help the Ukraine export more grain.
Related: After Nord Stream was shut down, Gazprom sent gas to Europe through Ukraine.
Since the start of the war, Ukraine’s grain exports have dropped because its Black Sea ports have been shut down. This has caused food prices around the world to rise and caused people to worry about food shortages.
“Tomorrow, I’ll sign an agreement with Romania that will let Ukraine send even more grains to Europe and developing countries, especially those in the Mediterranean, which need them for food,” France Inter radio quoted Transport Minister Clement Beaune as saying.
The International Monetary Fund is also looking for ways to help countries that are having trouble paying for food because of war. On Monday, the IMF’s Executive Board will meet to talk about how to help these countries.