Russian warmongers have urged Vladimir Putin to plunge Ukraine ‘into cold and darkness’ this winter.

Bogdan Bezpalko, appearing on state television, called for the Kremlin to deploy more missile strikes.

‘It can’t be a one off’, he said.

‘It needs to be constant for two to five weeks in order to disable their infrastructure entirely.’

Bezpalko, a political scientist in Russia, urged Putin to target power lines, transport hubs and other key buildings.

‘Then Ukraine will descend into cold and darkness’, he warned.

‘They won’t be able to bring in ammunition or fuel, and then the Ukrainian Army will turn into a crowd of armed men with chunks of iron.

‘This [missile strikes] need to be done constantly, not just once.’

A medical worker rushes past a burning car after a Russian attack in Kyiv on Monday (Picture: AP)

Smoke was seen for miles after a similar attack in Lviv (Picture: Pavlo Palamarchuk/SOPA Images/Shutterstock)

Recent missile strikes in Ukraine, thought to be in retaliation for the attack on a bridge in Crimea, killed 14 and wounded 34 in the space of 24 hours.

More than a dozen missiles were fired at the city of Zaporizhzhia and its suburbs, damaging residential buildings.

The attack, which took place overnight, was branded ‘absolute evil’ by President Volodymyr Zelensky.

And on Monday, Ukrainian authorities said similar attacks killed 19 people, including five in Kyiv, the capital.

A residential building was hit in a missile strike in Zaporizhzhia on October 9 (Picture: Reuters)

The attack, which took place at night was branded ‘absolute evil’ by President Volodymyr Zelensky (Picture: Getty Images)

One of Ukraine’s top children’s cancer surgeons was among the dead.

Dr Oksana Leontyeva was killed in the centre of Kyiv as she ‘hurried to see her patients’, her hospital confirmed.

Tragically, her son Gregory is now an orphan as his father was killed last year.

Following the attack, President Zelensky called Russia a ‘terrorist state’ who are ‘not capable of opposing us on the battlefield’.

Missile strikes have also caused the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant to lose all external power for the second time in five days.

Damage once again increased the risk of a radiation disaster, the country’s state nuclear operator said today.

The nuclear scare came amid a flurry of developments in Russia’s seven-and-a-half-month invasion of Ukraine.

Alexei Miller, head of the Russian state-owned energy giant Gazprom, this evening warned there was ‘no guarantee’ that Europe would survive this winter.

Vladimir Putin has been urged to deploy more missile strikes by TV pundits (Picture: EPA)

It comes as Gazprom bosses warn of a difficult winter not only for Ukraine, but for wider Europe (Picture: Getty Images)

He claimed countries who had made the move away from Russian-supplied would struggle with current gas reserves.

Speaking in Moscow, Miller claimed the likes of Germany would only survive for around two or three months with current supplies.

Meanwhile, while Putin turns to further desperation in the war, Zelensky’s troops have made further progress in reclaiming land.

Ukraine’s southern command said its forces recaptured five settlements in the southern Kherson region, on the western fringe of an arc of Russian-controlled territory in eastern and southern Ukraine.

Kherson, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Luhansk are four regions recently annexed by Russia, a move condemned as illegal under international law by many countries and the U.N. secretary-general.

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His comments come as Russia warn there is ‘no guarantee’ that Europe will survive this winter without Russian-supplied energy.