Russia hits Ukraine’s oil, gas infrastructure

Russian drones hit Ukraine’s oil and gas infrastructure in the central Poltava region, causing damage and a fire, the state energy company Naftogaz said on Friday.

“This is yet another targeted attack on our oil and gas infrastructure. Since the beginning of the year, the enemy has attacked Naftogaz Group facilities more than 20 times,” Sergii Koretskyi, Naftogaz CEO said in a post on Facebook.

Nearly four years into its full-scale invasion, Russia controls about 20% of Ukrainian territory. Many of the estimated 3 million to 5 million people who remain in regions under Moscow’s control face housing, water, power, heat and health care woes.

Even President Vladimir Putin has acknowledged “many truly pressing, urgent problems” in the regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, which were illegally annexed by Moscow months after the all-out war began on Feb.24, 2022.

Russian citizenship, language and culture is forced upon residents, including in school lesson plans and textbooks.

Some residents live in fear of being accused of sympathising with Kyiv, according to Ukrainians who have left. Many have been imprisoned, beaten and killed, according to human rights activists.

Russia established a “vast network of secret and official detention centers where tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians” are held indefinitely without charge, said Oleksandra Matviichuk, head of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Center for Civil Liberties.

Russian officials have refused to comment on past allegations by UN human rights officials that it tortures civilians and prisoners of war.

Inna Vnukova spent the first days of the Russian occupation in the Luhansk region hiding in a damp basement with her family. Outside in her village of Kudriashivka, soldiers bullied residents, set up checkpoints and looted homes. There was constant shelling.

“Everyone was very scared and afraid to go outside,” Vnukova told reporters in Estonia, where she now lives. The troops sought out officials and civil servants like her and her husband, Oleksii Vnukov.

In mid-March 2022, she and her 16-year-old son, Zhenya, fled the village with her brother’s family, even though it meant leaving her husband behind temporarily. They risked a trip by car to nearby Starobilsk, waving a white sheet amid mortar fire.

Oleksii Vnukov, a court security officer, stayed for nearly two weeks. Russian soldiers twice threatened to kill him before he escaped.

“The people there aren’t living, they’re just surviving,” he said of the 150 people - including the couple’s parents - who still live in the village that once was home to 800.

Vnukova and her husband have a new life in Estonia, where she works in a printing house and he is an electrician. Their son is now 20, and they have a 1-year-old daughter, Alisa.

Russian forces besieged Mariupol for weeks before the port city fell in May 2022. The bombing of the Donetsk Academic Regional Drama Theater on March 16 of that year killed nearly 600 people in and around the building, an AP investigation found - the war’s single deadliest known attack against civilians.

Agencies