Russian strikes ravage grid, threaten ever longer outages
KYIV, Ukraine — Ukraine’s electricity grid chief warned of hours-long power outages Friday as Russia zeroed in on the nation’s energy infrastructure with heavy artillery and missile attacks that have interrupted supplies to as much as 40% of the country’s people at the onset of winter.
Freezing temperatures were putting additional pressure on energy networks, grid operator Ukrenergo said.
“You always need to prepare for the worst. We understand that the enemy wants to destroy our power system in general, to cause long outages,” Ukrenergo’s Chief Executive Volodymyr Kudrytskyi told Ukrainian state television. “We need to prepare for possible long outages, but at the moment we are introducing schedules that are planned and will do everything to ensure that the outages are not very long.”
The capital of Kyiv is already facing a “huge deficit in electricity,” Mayor Vitali Klitschko told the Associated Press. Some 1.5 million to 2 million people — about half of the city’s population — are periodically plunged into darkness as authorities switch electricity from one district to another.
“It’s a critical situation,” he said.
Kudrytskyi added that the power situation at critical facilsian ities such as hospitals and schools has been stabilized.
Those facilities were targeted overnight in the northeastern Kharkiv region, where energy equipment was damaged, according to governor Oleh Syniehubov. Eight people including energy crews and police were injured trying to clear up the debris, he said.
Moscow’s attacks on Ukraine’s energy and power facilities have fueled fears of what the dead of winter will bring. Ukraine’s energy infrastructure had again been targeted Thursday, two days after Russia unleashed a nationwide barrage of more than 100 missiles and drones that knocked out power to 10 million people.
In the past 24 hours, Rusforces unleashed the breadth of their arsenal to attack Ukraine’s southeast, employing drones, rockets, heavy artillery and warplanes that killed at least six civilians and wounded six others, the president’s office said.
In the wake of its humiliating retreat from the southern city of Kherson, Moscow intensified its assault on the eastern Donetsk region, where Russia’s Defense Ministry said Friday its forces took control of the village of Opytne and repelled a Ukrainian counteroffensive to reclaim the settlements of Solodke, Volodymyrivka and Pavlivka. The city of Bakhmut, a key target of Moscow’s, remains the scene of heavy fighting.