Zelenskiy urges Ukrainians to conserve energy as winter looms

UKRAINE President Volodymyr Zelenskiy appealed to Ukrainians to conserve energy amid relentless Russian strikes that have halved the country’s power capacity, as the UN health body warned of a humanitarian disaster in Ukraine this winter.

Authorities said millions of Ukrainians, including in the capital Kyiv, could face power cuts at least until the end of March due to the missile attacks, which Ukraine’s national grid operator Ukrenergo said had wreaked “colossal” damage.

Temperatures have been unseasonably mild in Ukraine this autumn, but are starting to dip below zero and are expected to drop to -20°C or lower in some areas during winter months.

Russia’s targeting of Ukrainian energy facilities follows a series of battlefield setbacks that have included a pullout of Russian forces from the southern city of Kherson to the east bank of the Dnipro River that bisects the country.

The World Health Organization said hundreds of Ukrainian hospitals and health-care facilities lacked fuel, water and electricity to meet people’s basic needs. Workers are racing to repair damaged power infrastructure, said Yasno, which provides energy for Kyiv.

Russia’s strikes on energy infrastructure are a consequence of Kyiv being unwilling to negotiate, said Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov.

Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said Russia was bombarding Kherson from across the Dnipro River now that its troops had fled. Ukraine’s Suspilne news agency reported fresh explosions in Kherson city yesterday. Moscow denies intentionally targeting civilians.

Meanwhile Ukraine yesterday received a new €2.5 billion (about R44bn) tranche of financial support from the EU.

Ukraine’s SBU security service and police raided a 1000-year-old Orthodox Christian monastery in Kyiv early yesterday as part of operations to counter suspected “subversive activities by Russian special services”, the SBU said.

The Kyiv Pechersk Lavra complex, or Monastery of the Caves, is a Ukrainian cultural treasure and headquarters of the Russian-backed wing of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church that falls under the Moscow Patriarchate. Russia’s Orthodox Church condemned the raid as an “act of intimidation”.

Battles continued to rage in the east, where Russia has sent some of the forces it shifted from around Kherson, pressing an offensive of its own along a stretch of front line west of Donetsk held by its proxies since 2014. Russian shelling also hit a humanitarian aid distribution centre in the town of Orihiv in south-eastern Ukraine yesterday, killing a volunteer and wounding two women, the regional governor said.

Orihiv is about 110km east of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station which has been shelled again in the past few days, with Russia and Ukraine trading blame for the blasts.

The Kremlin said yesterday that no progress had been made towards creating a security zone around the nuclear reactor complex.