View of the port of Odessa. Archival photoMOSCOW, Oct. 21 The authorities of the Odessa and Nikolaev regions of Ukraine announced an air alert. Governor Vitaliy Kim published a warning for residents of the Nikolaev region in Telegram. At the same time, the alarm was announced in the Odessa region, the speaker of the regional military administration, Serhiy Bratchuk, announced this. The head of the Poltava regional administration, Dmitry Lunin, raised the alarm, and the Ukrainian media reported that warnings were also being heard in the neighboring Dnipropetrovsk and Kharkiv regions. Since the beginning of last week, the Russian Armed Forces have been delivering strikes with long-range precision weapons at military command and control, communications and energy facilities in Ukraine. The most massive shelling occurred on October 10 and 11. As Vladimir Putin said at a meeting with permanent members of the Security Council on October 10, this is a response to the terrorist attack on the Crimean bridge organized by Kyiv and other attacks on civilian facilities in Russia. President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky said on October 18 that 30 percent of power plants in the country have been destroyed. Since February 24, Russia has been conducting a special military operation to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine. Vladimir Putin called its goal «the protection of people who have been subjected to bullying and genocide by the Kyiv regime for eight years.» The Armed Forces are faced with the task of liberating Donbass and guaranteeing Russia's security.
