Moscow, Russia - A massive aerial bombardment of Ukraine's energy facilities was in response to Kyiv striking Russian territory with Western-supplied missiles, President Vladimir Putin said Thursday.

A massive aerial bombardment of Ukraine's energy facilities was in response to Kyiv striking Russian territory with Western-supplied missiles, President Vladimir Putin said Thursday.

Moscow launched almost 200 missiles and drones targeting Ukraine's energy grid, with President Volodymyr Zelensky alleging "cluster munitions" were fired in what he called a "despicable escalation" almost three years into the war.

More than a million homes in western Ukraine were temporarily without power after the strikes as the country's energy operator announced emergency blackouts on Thursday.

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"We carried out a comprehensive strike," Putin told allies during a visit to Kazakhstan several hours after the attack.

"It was a response to continued attacks on our territory by (US) ATACMS missiles," he said in the televised remarks. "As I have said repeatedly, there will always be a response from our side."

He said the Russian military command was selecting targets to hit in Ukraine, threatening that future strikes could target government buildings in Kyiv.

Putin also claimed Russia knew how many long-range weapons were given to Kyiv and where they were located.

But the Kremlin leader refrained from repeating his previous threat that Russia considered military targets in Western countries that supply weapons to Ukraine legitimate targets for possible Russian strikes.

More than half a million people in Ukraine's western Lviv region were cut off from electricity, with another 280,000 in the western Rivne region and 215,000 in the northwestern Volyn region, officials said.

Around noon local time, Ukrenergo said emergency power cuts had been lifted, though scheduled regional outages remained in place.

AFP journalists in the capital Kyiv heard blasts ring out over the capital overnight as air defense systems targeted Russian drones and missiles, with locals crowding into the underground metro system for cover.

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Putin said Russia launched more than 90 missiles and 100 drones, and claimed 17 targets had been hit, with the Russian leader rarely giving such numbers.

The energy ministry said it was the 11th massive Russian attack on Ukraine's civilian energy infrastructure this year.

Speaking in Astana at a summit for the Moscow-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), Putin meanwhile boasted about the power of Russia's new hypersonic Oreshnik missile, which it used for the first time in a strike on the Ukrainian city of Dnipro last week.

The Kremlin chief said the ballistic missile could turn anything "into dust" and that several of the weapons fired together would be "comparable to a nuclear strike."

"If there were more strikes on Russian territory, we will be responding, including with possible (more) testing of Oreshniks in combat conditions," he said.