At least four people have been killed and more than a dozen others injured in drone and missile attacks across the country, authorities said. Separately, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres announced the extension of a four-month deal to ensure the safe delivery of Ukraine’s grain, food and fertilizer exports through the Black Sea, days before it expired. Guterres said in a statement that the United Nations is also “fully committed” to removing obstacles that have prevented the export of food and fertilizer from Russia, which is one of two agreements reached between the two countries and Turkey in July . The agreements signed in Istanbul aim to help reduce food and fertilizer prices and avoid a global food crisis. There was no immediate confirmation of the deal from Russia. Air raid sirens sounded across Ukraine early Thursday amid fears that Moscow was launching its latest large-scale missile attack as the war approaches the nine-month mark. In Kyiv, the city’s military administration said air defenses shot down at least two cruise missiles and five Iranian-made explosive drones. With Kremlin forces on the ground pushed back, Russia has increasingly resorted in recent weeks to airstrikes targeting energy infrastructure and other political targets in parts of Ukraine it does not hold. Ukrainian air defenses this week appear to have had a much higher hit rate than in previous barrages last month, analysts say. The improvement comes in part from air defense systems provided by the West. But some rockets and drones still get through. Russian strikes hit Dnipro and Ukraine’s southern Odesa region for the first time in weeks. Valentyn Reznichenko, governor of the eastern Dnipropetrovsk region, said a large fire broke out in Dnipro after strikes in the city hit an industrial target. The attack injured at least 14 people, including a teenage girl, and all were being treated in hospitals in the city, Reznichenko said. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy posted on Telegram a video of what he said was one of the explosions in Dnipro. Dash cam video shows a fiery explosion engulfing a rainy road. “This is another confirmation from Dnipro how terrorists want peace,” Zelensky wrote, referring to Kremlin forces. “The peaceful city and people’s desire to live their ordinary lives. Going to work, to their affairs. Rocket attack!” Elsewhere, a Russian raid that hit a residential building killed at least four people overnight in Vilnius, Zaporizhia region. Rescuers were combing the rubble for any other victims, according to Kyrylo Tymoshenko, a senior official in Ukraine’s presidential office. Major infrastructure was also damaged in the northeastern region of Kharkiv, in the Izyum district, injuring three workers, the regional administration said. Dnipro Mayor Boris Filatov said in a Facebook post that one of his staff was among the injured and showed a photo of what he said was her coat pierced by a piece of shrapnel. An infrastructure target was hit in the Odesa region, governor Maksym Marchenko said on Telegram, warning of the threat of a “massive missile across the entire territory of Ukraine.” Officials in Poltava, Kharkiv, Khmelnytskyi and Rivne regions urged residents to stay in bomb shelters. Thursday’s blasts followed a massive barrage of Russian raids on Tuesday. This was the largest attack to date on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure that also resulted in a missile hitting Poland. Russia is increasingly targeting Ukraine’s power grid as winter approaches. The latest barrage followed days of euphoria in Ukraine sparked by one of its biggest military successes – last week’s recapture of the southern city of Kherson. The head of Ukraine’s presidential office, Andriy Yermak, called the strikes on energy targets “naive cowardly tactics of losers” in a Telegram post on Thursday. “Ukraine has already resisted extremely difficult blows from the enemy, which did not lead to the results that the Russian cowards hoped for,” Yermak wrote, urging Ukrainians not to ignore the air raid sirens. Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called the extension of the grain deal a “key decision in the global fight against the food crisis.”
Jamey Keaten in Geneva and Suzan Fraser in Ankara, Turkey contributed to this report.
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