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Russian missiles and drones struck nearly a dozen Ukrainian critical infrastructure facilities in a major airstrike early on Wednesday, causing serious damage at three Soviet-era thermal power plants, Kyiv officials said.

The air force said it shot down 39 of 55 missiles and 20 out of 21 attack drones used in the attack, which piles more pressure on Ukraine’s beleaguered energy system more than two years since Russia launched its full-scale invasion, Reuters reported.

“Another massive attack on our energy industry!” Energy Minister German Galushchenko wrote on the Telegram app. Two people were injured in the Kyiv region and one was hurt in the Kirovohrad region, Interior Minister Ihor Klymenko said.

Some 350 rescuers were racing to minimise the damage caused to multiple energy facilities, 30 homes, public transport vehicles, cars and a fire station, he said.

Power generation and transmission facilities in the Poltava, Kirovohrad, Zaporizhzhia, Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Vinnytsia regions were targeted, Galushchenko said. The strike was the latest in a wave of attacks on critical energy infrastructure that began in March.

The attacks have already forced authorities to impose rolling blackouts in several regions, but their full impact will likely be felt later in the year when energy consumption peaks at the height of summer and in winter.

Apart for southeastern Zaporizhzhia, all those regions are located far from the front lines in the east where heavy fighting is taking place and Russia has been gaining ground.

Galushchenko did not name the hit facilities, part of a policy of wartime secrecy that Kyiv says is needed to prevent Russia using the information for further airstrikes.

Lviv governor Maksym Kozytskyi said Russia also attacked a natural gas storage facility in his region in the west of the country, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported.

There was no immediate comment from Moscow. Russia denies targeting civilians but it sees the Ukrainian energy system as a legitimate military target.

Hello and welcome to the Ukraine live blog. We start with news that Russia has hit critical energy infrastructure in Stryi district and a power generation facility in Chervonohrad district in western Ukraine on Wednesday, Lviv governor said in a statement on Telegram messaging app.

The missile strike caused a fire at the power generation facility, with emergency services working on site, he said. No casualties were reported in the attack on Lviv region at the time, Reuters reported.

Russia’s air attack caused serious equipment damage at three thermal power plants, DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private electricity company, said.

“The equipment is seriously damaged,” DTEK said on the Telegram messaging app. “Power engineers are currently working on eliminating the consequences of the attack.”

In other news so far today:

• Two Ukrainian security officials have been detained over an alleged Russian assassination plot against Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Ukraine’s president. Luke Harding writes from Kyiv that the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) said it had exposed a network of agents run by Russia’s FSB that also intended to kill Ukraine’s military intelligence chief, Kyrylo Budanov, and the SBU’s head, Vasyl Maliuk.

• The plans included finding someone in the presidential entourage to capture and kill Zelenskiy, the SBU said; and to kill Budanov and others with a missile strike, kamikaze drones launched locally, then another missile strike to destroy the evidence of drones.

• The SBU named three FSB intelligence officers behind the operation as Maxim Mishustin, Dmytro Perlin and Aleksii Kornev. In intercepted messages, Perlin referred to the missile attack on Budanov as a “big bird” and the drone as a “small bird”. He emphasised: “The order is rocket, drone, rocket.”

• The SBU said it recovered drones, warheads and mines from one of the arrested Ukrainian alleged accomplices. He and others face charges of treason and terrorism. One of the alleged agents was a colonel serving in Ukraine’s state guard service, said to have met Kornev secretly before 2022 in a neighbouring European country.

• Ukrainian prosecutors say they have examined debris from 21 of around 50 North Korean ballistic missiles launched by Russia between late December and late February. The office of the chief prosecutor, Andriy Kostin, told Reuters the missiles’ failure rate appeared to be high: “About half of the North Korean missiles lost their programmed trajectories and exploded in the air; in such cases the debris was not recovered.”

• Use of North Korean missiles by Russia threatens a nearly two-decade consensus among permanent members of the UN security council on preventing North Korea expanding its nuclear and ballistic missile programmes. Russia recently vetoed the annual renewal of UN sanctions monitoring of North Korea.

• Russia has been shipping refined petroleum to North Korea at levels that appear to violate the mandates of the security council, a US official said on Thursday, adding that the US was planning new sanctions in response. The US would continue working with other countries to impose sanctions “against those working to facilitate arms and refined petroleum transfers between Russia and the DPRK”.

• Romania’s president, Klaus Iohannis, has said he is open to discussing sending a Patriot system to Ukraine after German appeals to EU and Nato member states.
  Iohannis met with the US president, Joe Biden, at the White House on Tuesday.

• Ukrainian forces on Tuesday attacked an oil storage depot and sparked a large fire, injuring five people, on the outskirts of the Russian-held city of Luhansk in eastern Ukraine, the region’s Russia-installed leader said. There was no official Ukrainian statement on the incident. Separatist fighters backed and financed by Russia seized control of large chunks of Luhansk and Donetsk regions in eastern Ukraine in 2014 after Moscow annexed Crimea.