Russia escalates attacks on key Ukrainian region of Odesa

Russia has intensified its strikes on the southern Ukrainian region of Odesa, causing widespread power cuts and threatening the region's maritime infrastructure.Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Oleksiy Kuleba said Moscow was carrying out "systematic" attacks on the region. Last week, he warned that the focus of the war "may have shifted towards Odesa".President Volodymyr Zelensky said the repeated attacks were an attempt by Moscow to block Ukraine's access to maritime logistics. Earlier in December, Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened to sever Ukraine's access to the sea as retaliation for drone attacks on tankers of Russia's "shadow fleet" in the Black Sea."Shadow fleet" is a term that refers to hundreds of tankers used by Russia to bypass Western sanctions imposed after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.On Monday evening, strikes hit port infrastructure in Odesa, damaging a civilian vessel, the regional governor said.It was the latest in a series of hundreds of strikes which have disrupted power supplies in the region for days on end and caused several casualties. On Sunday night, strikes cut off electricity for 120,000 people and sparked a fire at a major port which destroyed dozens of containers of flour and vegetable oil.Last week, a ballistic missile strike on the Pivdenniy port east of Odesa killed eight people and injured at least 30.Another attack earlier in the week killed a woman who was travelling in a car with her three children and temporarily cut off the Odesa region's only bridge linking Ukraine and Moldova.Zelensky indicated a new commander of the air force for the region would be selected soon following the dismissal of Dmytro Karpenko over the weekend.Odesa's port has always been key for the country's economy. The city is Ukraine's third largest after Kyiv and Kharkiv. It now occupies strategic importance as other ports in the Zaporizhzhia, Kherson and Mykolayiv regions are inaccessible to Ukraine due to Russian occupation.Despite the war, Ukraine remains one of the world's top exporters of wheat and corn. Since August 2023, Odesa has been the starting point of a crucial corridor that allows it to export grain out of the country, following the coastlines of Romania and Bulgaria before reaching Turkey.Zelensky, who has previously accused Russia of "sowing chaos" on the people of Odesa, said that "everyone must see that without pressure on Russia, they have no intention of genuinely ending their aggression".His comments came as the latest round of US-led diplomatic efforts wrapped up in Miami. The US separately met the Ukrainian and Russian delegations, with the meetings yielding optimistic statements but no clear progress to bring the end of Moscow's nearly four-year war on Ukraine any closer.US President Donald Trump's special envoy Steve Witkoff said he and his Ukrainian counterpart Rustem Umerov had worked on "aligning positions" on a 20-point draft peace plan put forward by Ukraine earlier this month. The plan is an alternative to a proposal presented by the US in November, which was seen as favourable to Moscow.Before Russian envoy Kirill Dmitriev even returned to Moscow from Florida, Kremlin foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov told reporters that the European and Ukrainian changes to the peace proposal would not improve the chances of peace being achieved.On Monday, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov accused EU countries of having a "firm aspiration" to derail potential Russia-US agreements on Ukraine and to "in general prevent Russia-American relations getting healthier".He also said European countries were "possessed by a maniacal" fear of a Russian attack. Russia was ready to confirm in a legal agreement that it had no intention of attacking either the EU or Nato, Ryabkov added, echoing previous comments from Putin. "We've never planned to [attack Europe], but if they want to hear it from us, well, let's do it, we'll put it in writing," Putin said in November.