Russia has intensified its strikes on the southern Ukrainian region of Odesa, causing widespread power cuts and threatening the region’s maritime infrastructure.Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Oleksiy Kuleba said Moscow was carrying out “systematic” attacks on the region. Last week, he warned that the focus of the war “may have shifted towards Odesa”.President Volodymyr Zelensky said the repeated attacks were an attempt by Moscow to block Ukraine’s access to maritime logistics. Earlier in December, Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened to sever Ukraine’s access to the sea as retaliation for drone attacks on tankers of Russia’s “shadow fleet” in the Black Sea.”Shadow fleet” is a term that refers to hundreds of tankers used by Russia to bypass Western sanctions imposed after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.On Monday evening, strikes hit port infrastructure in Odesa, damaging a civilian vessel, the regional governor said.It was the latest in a series of hundreds of strikes which have disrupted power supplies in the region for days on end and caused several casualties. On Sunday night, strikes cut off electricity for 120,000 people and sparked a fire at a major port which destroyed dozens of containers of flour and vegetable oil.Last week, a ballistic missile strike on the Pivdenniy port east of Odesa killed eight people and injured at least 30.Another attack earlier in the week killed a woman who was travelling in a car with her three children and temporarily cut off the Odesa region’s only bridge linking Ukraine and Moldova.Zelensky indicated a new commander of the air force for the region would be selected soon following the dismissal of Dmytro Karpenko over the weekend.Odesa’s port has always been key for the country’s economy. The city is Ukraine’s third largest after Kyiv and Kharkiv. It now occupies strategic importance as other ports in the Zapori …
