A drone attack early Friday killed one man in Kherson, hours after authorities urged residents to leave as intensifying Russian attacks on the southern Ukrainian city risk cutting power supplies ahead of the long winter.
Russian forces are positioned on the opposite bank of the Dnipro River, which borders the city briefly occupied by Moscow in 2022, making it particularly vulnerable to shelling.
The drone attack early Friday in Kherson's Korabelnyi district killed a 61-year-old man who was taken to hospital with a "penetrating chest wound", Yaroslav Shanko, the head of the Kherson city administration, said.
Three others wounded were taken to hospital in the Dniprovsky district.
The attack came after regional governor Oleksandr Prokudin on Thursday urged residents of Kherson, "especially families with children and elderly people", to "please leave", in a Telegram post.
Prokudin said there was an "extremely difficult security situation" in the city, which had about 280,000 inhabitants before the start of Russia's invasion in February 2022. It was occupied by Russian forces from March to November of that year.
"The enemy is intensifying its attacks every day on the region's critical infrastructure," he said, adding that on Wednesday "Russian forces again attacked Kherson's district heating plant with glide bombs".
The facility "sustained very serious damage", he said, adding that Kherson may find itself "without electricity or heating not for hours or days but for a long period".
Ukrainian stocks of interceptor missiles have also started to dwindle.
"There is no way to destroy these types of drones or aerial bombs in any region of our country," he said.
Last winter, Russia repeatedly targeted Ukrainian power plants, plunging millions of people into cold and darkness.
President Volodymyr Zelensky warned earlier this month that Ukraine had "virtually no intact thermal power plants".
- Repeated attacks on Kyiv -
Russia and Ukraine have for several months been ramping up their long-range strikes, increasingly targeting civilian infrastructure such as logistics warehouses and oil and port facilities.
These attacks are causing a rising number of civilian casualties.
Further from the front line, Ukraine's capital Kyiv has been particularly targeted this summer.
On Thursday, the capital spent nearly 15 hours under air raid alert due to repeated drone attacks, according to local authorities.
This "shows another way Russia is using its weapons to disrupt civilian life", the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry said in response, warning that Moscow "continues to choose terror and war".
In the face of Russian bombardments, Zelensky has consistently appealed to allies for new air defense systems.
While Ukraine has in recent days received fresh promises of military aid from European countries, including France, it primarily relies on advanced US Patriot systems to protect its airspace.
Deliveries of these missiles have sharply decreased, however, as US stockpiles depleted because of the Middle East war.
Four and a half years after Russia's large-scale invasion of Ukraine, negotiations, briefly undertaken with US mediation to end the conflict, are at a standstill.
Russian Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov has nonetheless visited troops fighting on the Ukrainian front to congratulate them on their "successes" in the eastern Donetsk region.
During the visit he said the Russian army was now only a few kilometers from Sloviansk and Kramatorsk, cities whose capture is a key objective for the Kremlin.
