South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Utility: Parts of Ukraine to go dark
Kyiv, 7 regions face blackouts as Russia continues shelling
KYIV, Ukraine — Ukraine’s state electricity operator on Saturday announced blackouts in Kyiv and seven other regions of the country in the aftermath of Russia’s devastating strikes on energy infrastructure.
The move comes as Russian forces continue to pound Ukrainian cities and villages with missiles and drones, inflicting damage on power plants, water supplies and other civilian targets, in a grinding war that is in its 10th month.
Russia has denied that the drones it has used in Ukraine came from Iran, but the Islamic Republic’s foreign minister on Saturday for the first time acknowledged supplying Moscow.
“We gave a limited number of drones to Russia months before the Ukraine war,” Hossein Amirabdollahian told reporters after a meeting in Tehran.
Previously, Iranian officials had denied arming Russia. Last week, Iran’s ambassador to the U.N., Amir Saeid Iravani, called the allegations “totally unfounded” and reiterated Iran’s position of neutrality in the war.
The U.S. and its Western allies on the Security Council have called on Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to investigate whether Russia has used Iranian drones to attack civilians in Ukraine.
As he acknowledged the shipment, Amirabdollahian said Saturday that Iran was oblivious to the use of its drones in Ukraine. He said Iran remained committed to stopping the conflict.
“If (Ukraine) has any
documents in their possession that Russia used Iranian drones in Ukraine, they should provide them to us,” he said. “If it is proven to us that Russia used Iranian drones in the war against Ukraine, we will not be indifferent to this issue.”
Meanwhile, Ukrenergo, the sole operator of Ukraine’s high-voltage transmission lines, initially said in an online statement Saturday that scheduled blackouts would take place in the capital and the greater Kyiv region, as well as the Chernihiv, Cherkasy, Zhytomyr, Sumy, Poltava and Kharkiv regions.
Later in the day, however, the company released an update saying that scheduled outages for a specific number of hours aren’t enough
and instead there would be emergency outages that could last indefinitely.
Ukraine has been grappling with power outages and the disruption of water supplies since Russia started unleashing massive barrages of missiles and drones on the country’s energy infrastructure last month.
Officials in Ukraine’s capital city say they have begun planning for a once unthinkable possibility: a complete blackout that would require the evacuation of the city’s approximately 2 million remaining residents.
The situation is already so dire, with 40% of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure damaged or destroyed, that municipal workers in Kyiv are setting up more than 1,000 shelters that
can double as bunkers with supplies and generators while engineers rush to try to fix bombed-out power stations.
“We understand that if Russia continues such attacks, we may lose our entire electricity system,” Roman Tkachuk, the director of security for Kyiv, said Friday.
In addition to setting up “resiliency centers,” authorities in the city have equipped emergency vehicles with loudspeakers in case communications systems fail and have stated a campaign to inform the public about evacuation rally points.
According to Ukraine’s presidential office, at least three civilians were killed and eight others were
wounded over the past 24 hours by Russian shelling of nine Ukrainian regions, where drones, missiles and heavy artillery were used.
About 40 shells were fired overnight at the city of Nikopol, Dnipropetrovsk Gov. Valentyn Reznichenko said on Telegram. The Russian forces targeted the city and the areas around it with heavy artillery, as they have done repeatedly since July. Two fires broke out, and more than a dozen residential and utility buildings, as well as a gas pipeline, were damaged, he said.
Russian forces also fired missiles at the southeastern Zaporizhzhia region, which has been illegally annexed by Moscow. According to regional Gov. Oleksandr Starukh, the attack took place after midnight and damaged businesses.
In the eastern Donetsk region, also annexed by Russia, eight Ukrainian cities and villages were shelled, including Bakhmut, Avdiivka and Porkovsk.
Russian-installed authorities in Donetsk reported an attempt on the life of a Moscow-appointed judge. Alexander Nikulin, who was on a judicial panel that in June sentenced to death two Britons and a Moroccan fighting for Ukraine, has been hospitalized with gunshot wounds and is in grave condition, officials said.