Airstrikes cut power and water supplies to hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians on Tuesday, part of what the country’s president called an expanding Russian campaign to drive the nation into the cold and dark and make peace talks impossible.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said nearly one-third of Ukraine’s power stations have been destroyed in the past week, “causing massive blackouts across the country.” “No space left for negotiations with Putin’s regime,” he tweeted.

Depriving people of water, electricity and heat as winter begins to bite and the broadening use of so-called suicide drones that nosedive into targets have opened a new phase in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war. Even far from front lines, basic utilities are no longer certainties, with daily strikes reaching far into the country and damaging key facilities, sometimes faster than they can be repaired.

The latest city shorn of power was Zhytomyr, home to military bases, industries and leafy boulevards, about 140 kilometres west of Kyiv. The mayor said the whole city of 250,000 lost power and also water initially. Repairs quickly reconnected some homes but 150,000 people were still without electricity hours after the morning strike, regional authorities said.

In the capital of Kyiv, missile strikes damaged two power facilities and killed two people, city authorities said. The attack left 50,000 people without power for a few hours, the facilities’ operator said. Missiles also severely damaged an energy facility in the south-central city of Dnipro. Some homes lost power but the operator couldn’t immediately say how many.

Russia is also mixing up its modes of attack.

Suicide drones set ablaze an infrastructure facility in the partly Russian-occupied southern Zaporizhzhia region, the regional governor said.

Air-defence S-300 missiles, which Russia has been repurposing as ground-attack weapons as its stocks diminish, were used to strike the southern city of Mykolaiv.

In the eastern city of Kharkiv, eight rockets fired from across the nearby border with Russia hit an industrial area, the regional governor said.

Meanwhile, Russia said on Tuesday that a technical malfunction had caused a military plane to crash a day earlier into a residential building in Yeysk town near Ukraine, killing 15 people and spurring an outpouring among locals.

Kherson evacuation

Russia’s army is preparing to evacuate civilians from the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson, occupied by Moscow, the Russian military commander for Ukraine operations said on Tuesday. “The Russian army will above all ensure the safe evacuation of the population” of Kherson, General Sergey Surovikin, who has been in charge of operations in Ukraine for the past 10 days, told state television Rossiya 24 describing the situation as “very difficult”.