Police experts work near a crater in front of hospital buildings damaged by a Russian missile strike, Kharkiv, Ukraine, April 27, 2024

Saturday’s Coverage: Zelenskiy — “You Are Deciding the Fate of the World”

Map: Institute for the Study of War

UPDATE 0651 GMT:

Ukraine air defenses downed five of nine attack drones fired by Russia overnight.

In the Mykolaiv region in southern Ukraine, a “heat-generating infrastructure site” was damaged. A hotel was “severely damaged”.

The Russians also launched an S-300 missile from the Belgorod region near the Ukraine border.

UPDATE 0635 GMT:

Russia’s authorities have imprisoned three more journalists.

Konstantin Gabov and Sergey Karelin were detained by courts, pending investigation and trial, over allegations that they worked for the Anti-Corruption Foundation, founded by the late Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny.

Each faces from two to six years in prison for “participation in an extremist organisation”.

Sergey Mingazov, a journalist for the Russian edition of Forbes magazine, has been detained on charges of spreading false information about the Russian military.

During Vladimir Putin’s reign in power, a series of journalists have been imprisoned or killed over their work. The crackdown intensified after the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, with laws imposing sentences on the pretext of disseminating “fake news”.

Gabov, a dual Israeli-Russian national, is a freelance producer who has worked for outlets such as Reuters. Karelin has been a cameraman for the Associated Press and for Deutsche Welle, until the Kremlin banned the German outlet in February 2022.

ORIGINAL ENTRY: Ukraine has endured another wave of Russian missile and drone attacks on energy infrastructure.

Air defenses downed 21 of 34 missiles early Saturday, but facilities were struck in the Dnipropetrovsk, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Lviv regions.

Ukraine’s largest private energy company, DTEK, reported that four of its six thermal power plants were significantly damaged.

In Kharkiv in northeast Ukraine, an S-300 missile struck a psychiatric hospital. A 53-year-old woman was injured.

Having failed to break Ukraine in his “energy war” from autumn 2022 to spring 2023, Vladimir Putin has returned to the tactic. At the end of March, the largest Russian attacks of 2024 knocked out key facilities such as the Dnipro Hydroelectric Power Plant, the country’s largest.

DTEK is still carrying out repairs from those stirkes, which reduced the company’s thermal capacity by 80%.

On Saturday, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy again called on the international community to bolster air defenses, depleted by the waves of attacks: “The world has all of the resources to assist us in intercepting every missile and drone fired by Russian terrorists. This is completely doable.”

In his nightly address to the nation, Zelenskiy continued:

Every day our country should gain strength. Every day we must reinforce Ukrainian positions. We need to make Moscow realize that this war will not yield any results for them. And it’s only through strength that we can achieve this.