Elsewhere, the mayor of Kharkiv, Ihor Terekhov, said there was shelling of a civilian area in the city, while the mayor of Lutsk, Ihor Polishchuk, said multiple explosions had been heard and electricity was out in part of the city.

Polishchuk said trolleybuses in Lutsk had stopped while the head of the Rivne administration Oleksandr Koval said electricity supplies had been cut to more than 280,000 people in the western region.

In the Lviv region, as many as 523,000 homes and businesses are without electricity, according to regional head Maksym Kozytsky.

Ukrainian authorities have responded by implementing pre-emptive emergency power cuts in order to minimise damaging overloads to the country’s grid.

Temperatures are dropping and the country has already experienced its first snowfalls, but the full force of Ukraine’s famously harsh winter has not yet been felt.

Ukrainian officials have been warning for some time that Russia has been stockpiling cruise and ballistic missiles in order to launch coordinated and country-wide attacks on Ukraine’s energy system.

If Russia keeps up these country-wide attacks on Ukraine’s energy system, as it has in previous winters, then the country will once again face a challenging few months.