Strikes put much of Ukraine in dark
Zelenskyy seeks UN response to Russian assault of power grid
KYIV, Ukraine — Russia unleashed a new missile onslaught on Ukraine’s battered energy grid Wednesday, robbing cities of power and some of water and public transport, too, compounding the hardship of winter for millions. The aerial mauling of power supplies also took nuclear plants and internet service offline and spilled blackouts into neighbor Moldova.
Multiple regions reported attacks in quick succession and cascading outages. Ukraine’s Energy Ministry said supplies were cut to “the vast majority of electricity consumers.” Lviv’s trams and trolleybuses stopped running as the city in western Ukraine lost both power and water, the mayor said. All of Kyiv lost water, the capital’s mayor said. Power also went out and public transport stopped in Kharkiv, the mayor of that northeastern city, Ukraine’s second largest, said.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy instructed Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Nations to request an urgent Security Council meeting and demanded a “resolute” international response.
Three people were killed and 11 wounded in a strike in Kyiv, city authorities said. Another four people were killed and 35 wounded in the wider Kyiv region, its governor said.
Russia has been pounding the power grid and other
facilities with missiles and exploding drones for weeks, wreaking damage faster than it can be repaired. Strikes had already damaged around half of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, Zelenskyy said before the latest barrage, and rolling power outages had become the horrid new normal for millions.
Ukrainian officials believe Russian President Vladimir Putin is hoping that the misery of unheated and unlit homes in winter’s cold and dark will turn public opinion against a continuation of the war — but they say it’s instead strengthening
Ukrainian resolve.
Ukraine’s air force said Russia launched around 70 cruise missiles and 51 were shot down, as were five exploding drones.
In Kyiv, a city of 3 million, the administration said water and heating would return to residential buildings on Thursday morning.
Late Wednesday and well after dark, the deputy head of Ukraine’s presidential office said that Kyiv and over a dozen regions, including Lviv and Odesa in the south, had been reconnected to the power grid.
Moldova, with Soviet-era energy systems interconnected
with Ukraine, also reported massive power outages — for the second time this month. President Maia Sandu accused Moscow of plunging the country of 2.6 million into darkness and the foreign minister summoned Russia’s ambassador for explanations.
“We cannot trust a regime that leaves us in the dark and cold, that intentionally kills people, out of a simple desire to keep other peoples in poverty and humiliation,” Sandu said.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz called Russia’s waves of strikes in recent weeks “intolerable” and said: “This bombing terror against the civilian population must stop, and immediately.”
Ukraine’s state-owned nuclear operator, Energoatom, said the country’s last three fully functioning nuclear power stations were all disconnected from the power grid in an “emergency protection” measure.
It also said radiation levels were unchanged at the sites and “all indicators are normal.”
The Energy Ministry said the attacks also caused a temporary blackout of most thermal and hydroelectric power plants, and also affected transmission facilities. Repair teams were working “but given the extent of the damage, we will need time,” it said on Facebook.
Wednesday’s blackouts also caused “the largest internet outage in Ukraine in months and the first to affect neighboring Moldova, which has since partially recovered,” said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at network-monitoring Kentik Inc.
The onslaught followed an overnight Russian rocket attack in the town of Vilniansk, close to the city of Zaporizhzhia in southern Ukraine, that destroyed a hospital maternity ward, killing a 2-day-old newborn boy and critically injuring a doctor.
The strike adds to the gruesome toll suffered by hospitals and other medical facilities — and their patients and staff — in the Russian invasion that will enter its 10th month this week.
Also Wednesday, the White House announced that the U.S. is sending an additional $400 million in ammunition and generators to Ukraine and is pulling the gear from its own stockpiles to get the support to Kyiv as fast as possible.
The package includes 200 generators, an undisclosed amount of additional rounds for both the advanced NASAMS air defense systems and the HIMARS artillery systems the U.S. has shipped to Ukraine, 150 heavy machine guns with thermal sights to shoot down drones, 10,000 120 mm mortar rounds and 20 million rounds of small arms ammunition, among other items, the Pentagon said.