KYIV, Ukraine — The latest Russian assault on Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure left most of Ukraine’s capital without running water on Monday, forcing residents to line up by the thousands at old stone water wells in the ancient heart of Kyiv and at metal spigots in marketplaces across the metropolis.
Eighty percent of the city was without water early Monday, after Russia launched dozens of cruise missiles at Ukraine, though that outage figure was cut in half by evening, officials said. The barrage — like many recently — appeared aimed largely at depriving people not just of fresh water but also of electricity and heat. Hundreds of thousands of people in Kyiv lost power, as did many residents in other cities.
Maksym Khaurat, 31, said he and his wife, who have a newborn baby, Miroslava, had already been enduring rolling blackouts, a lack of heat in their apartment and a failing internet connection. The loss of water was different. For the first time, they were unable to fill a glass of water from the tap, take a shower or flush a toilet.
“We can live without heat and light,” he said as he waited to fill up a water container.
Mr. Khaurat said he was having second thoughts about having returned to the city after relocating to western Ukraine earlier this year. “We have a lot of decisions to be made,” he said.
Russia’s Ministry of Defense claimed in a statement that it had taken aim at “the military control and energy systems of Ukraine.” In recent weeks, as Russian forces have lost ground in the south and east, they have sharply increased attacks on civilian infrastructure across the country, in an apparent attempt to break Ukrainians’ will by making their cities and towns unlivable.
Before those missile and drone barrages began, many people who had fled Kyiv early in the war returned, along with much of the city’s daily activity and energy.
The blows to the water system on Monday drove many people back to the age-old practice of trudging with their own containers to old communal wells or public taps. But Mr. Khaurat’s mood, like that of many of his compatriots, was one of defiance, not defeat, in the face of the war waged by President Vladimir V. Putin.
“I am angry,” he said. “Angry at that man in Russia. I hate him.”
Still, he said, many other Ukrainians have suffered far more than he and his family — and they endure. And, he added, “however bad this winter may be, it will be better than living under Russia.”
The war’s repercussions were also being felt beyond Ukraine’s borders.
Russia’s decision to suspend an agreement that allowed safe passage for Ukrainian grain shipments through the Black Sea will have “catastrophic consequences,” especially for places like Somalia, the drought-stricken country on the brink of famine, warned the International Rescue Committee, a nonprofit humanitarian group.
“A further disruption of critical grain exports could push Somalia over the edge,” the group said in a statement. Somalia relies on Ukraine for 70 percent of its grain imports, said Abdirahman Abdishakur, the country’s special presidential envoy for drought response.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said he had spoken with António Guterres, the U.N. secretary-general, to reaffirm his commitment to the grain deal.
Serhii Bratchuk, a spokesman for the regional government in southwestern Ukraine, said on Telegram that Russian forces had fired on two “civilian tugboats that were involved in the transportation of a barge with grain.” Two people were killed in the attack near the port of Ochakiv, midway between Kherson and Odesa, one was injured and “the fate of another crew member is unknown,” he said.
That was not a direct attack on the grain shipment deal; Ochakiv is not one of the ports covered by the agreement, and Russian forces have struck there before. But even if the assault was not directly linked to the grain program, the attack on Ochakiv demonstrates Russia’s naval dominance in the Black Sea — and how much the grain deal requires Russian cooperation.
On Monday, Moscow accused Britain of training Ukrainians in Ochakiv in the use of seagoing drones that were used in striking a Russian naval vessel in Sevastopol on Saturday, in Crimea — a claim that London denied.
Russia’s Defense Ministry, in a statement, linked Saturday’s attack in Sevastopol to the suspension of grain shipments, accusing Ukraine of using the safe passage corridor for “conducting operations against the Russian Federation.”
But even before the Saturday attack, Moscow had been threatening not to renew the deal when it expires at the end of November unless it won new concessions on its own exports of food and fertilizer.
Twelve cargo ships carrying grain, which were authorized to sail under the agreement before it was suspended, left Ukrainian ports on Monday, apparently without incident, after the Russians were notified.
Under the deal, brokered by Turkey and the United Nations, grain ships must stop in Istanbul for inspections that involved Russians. Moscow insists that it cannot allow ships to go to or from Ukraine without inspection, to ensure that they are not aiding Ukraine’s war effort.
In September, Ukrainian troops recaptured a vast stretch of the Kharkiv region, in the northeast, that was seized by Russia in the first weeks of war. More recently, they have advanced in the Kherson region in the south and the Donbas region in the east, though Russians still hold much of both areas. And on Oct. 8, an attack badly damaged the Kerch Strait Bridge, an important supply route and proud symbol of Mr. Putin’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014.
The head of Ukrainian military intelligence, Maj. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, said Monday that Russian forces might be driven in November from all lands west of the Dnipro River, including the city of Kherson, which would be another serious strategic and symbolic loss for Russia.
Since the bridge attack, Russia has launched flurries of ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and drones at civilian infrastructure around Ukraine.
“Instead of fighting on the battlefield, Russia fights civilians,” Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, said on Twitter. “Don’t justify these attacks by calling them a ‘response’. Russia does this because it still has the missiles and the will to kill Ukrainians.”
As Russia’s tactics have altered, so has what the Ukrainian military needs to wage war, and what its Western backers are supplying. Early on, shoulder-fired antitank missiles were the critical need. Then it was long-range and precision artillery.
Now air defense systems are paramount — though the ones Ukraine already had have performed well — and the United States and others have promised more.
The Ukrainian military said Russia fired 55 missiles on Monday, 45 of which were shot down. Thirteen civilians were injured, the Ukrinform news agency reported. The Foreign Ministry said 18 “objects of civilian critical infrastructure” were damaged. None of the figures could be confirmed independently.
Local officials in the cities of Zaporizhzhia in the south and Kharkiv in the northeast, and the Cherkasy region in central Ukraine, all reported that Russian strikes had hit critical infrastructure.
In Kyiv, where mandatory power rationing was already in force, about 270,000 homes whose electricity was knocked out on Monday still had no power by evening, said Vitaliy Klitschko, the mayor. Service on the city’s metro was being cut in half to conserve power, he said. Traffic lights across the capital were out early in the day, and cellular service was spotty.
Electricity is intricately connected to the water supply, which relies on pumps to raise water from aquifers, channel it from reservoirs, treat it, send it through a network of pipes and push it to the upper floors of buildings. Mr. Klitchko said 27 of Kyiv’s pumping stations that were knocked out on Monday were back in action by 6 p.m., some of them with the use of backup generators.
Marc Santora reported from Kyiv, and Matthew Mpoke Bigg from London. Reporting was contributed byRichard Pérez-Peña, Ivan Nechepurenko, Matt Stevens, Safak Timur, Monika Pronczuk, Maria Varenikova and Abdi Latif Dahir.
