Russia says it hit four cargo ships in the Black Sea and substations in five Ukrainian regions – what Kyiv says – sources

Russia’s defence ministry says it hit four ships in the Black Sea and six electricity substations in five Ukrainian regions, in three successive announcements from the morning of Sunday, November 8 to the morning of Monday, November 9. Moscow presents all the targets as military: according to it, the ships carried weapons or dual-use cargo for the Ukrainian armed forces, and the substations supplied the war industry. These are claims by one party to the war.

The Sunday first announcement concerned a container ship southwest of Odesa and the 330 kV substation at Bilosytsia in the Zhytomyr region. In the afternoon two more ships were added: a second container ship inside the port of Chornomorsk, which Moscow says had brought dual-use cargo, and a dry-cargo ship southwest of Odesa. At the same time the ministry reported a strike on the 330 kV Kamianska substation in the Dnipropetrovsk region.

In the third announcement, on Monday morning, the Russian side adds another dry-cargo ship, again southwest of Odesa, and strikes on substations near Bila Tserkva in the Kyiv region, in Kryvyi Rih and in Cherkasy, a railway traction substation in the Vinnytsia region and the Hlobyne plant in the Poltava region, where Moscow says long-range drones were being assembled and stored.

What Ukrainian authorities say

Sunday in Odesa began with one person killed in a Russian strike. The regional administration reported damage to an administrative building and an abandoned property, while in the morning a food warehouse that had been attacked before was hit again, causing a large fire. In the evening the same administration spoke of a massive attack on the energy grid, with power cuts in the north of the region.

After an energy meeting, Volodymyr Zelensky wrote that in the Dnipropetrovsk region, in Dnipro, Pavlohrad, Kamianske and other cities, crews were working to restore power and that at the peak of the outages more than 600,000 consumers were without electricity. A second meeting with regional heads discussed, he said, the difficulties of the energy system in the Zhytomyr region, where Bilosytsia is located. The overnight toll is covered in our report on the night of November 8.

The Russian campaign against shipping to Ukrainian ports has been escalating for weeks. In October drones sank the merchant ship Khoryv 13 nautical miles from Constanța, and a few days later the Contship Jet also sank off the Bulgarian coast. Romania’s Black Sea security was also at the centre of the Romanian-Turkish talks that followed the Khoryv sinking.