Russia launched air and rocket attacks on Ukraine

A woman removes clothes from her home destroyed by a Russian attack in the Donetsk region of Ukraine (December 10, 2022)

Russian drones attacked the southern Ukrainian port city of Odessa Saturday morning, causing the city and surrounding areas to lose power supplies, local officials said.

Odessa Mayor Gennadiy Trukhanov said on Facebook, “Given the extent of the damage, all users in Odessa were without electricity, except for vital infrastructure.”

Odessa Governor Maksym Marchenko said two drones were shot down over the Black Sea before hitting their targets. He said drones approaching the target “have deprived almost all districts and communities in our region of power.”

Russia launched about 20 airstrikes and more than 60 rocket attacks across Ukraine on Friday and Saturday, the Ukrainian General Staff said.

Oleksandr Shtupun, a spokesman for Ukraine’s General Staff, said more than 29 residential areas in Bakhmut, where the fighting was most intense, had been attacked.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Friday that the situation in several frontline cities in eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions “continues to be very difficult.”

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz told an event in Potsdam near Berlin Saturday that Russian President Vladimir Putin was determined to occupy parts of Ukraine and that his brutality showed no restraint, but that it was important to keep communicating.

Scholz said, “Our opinions are completely different. But I will continue to talk to him because I want to experience a moment when I might get out of this situation. This is impossible without talking to each other.

“We saw the brutality that the Russian president was able to do.” He basically got rid of the country in Chechnya. Or in Syria. There are no constraints there, it’s that simple.

Scholz also defended the government’s planned NATO target of raising the defense budget to 2 percent of the gross national product. He said NATO members need to be strong enough that no one dares to attack them.