Ukraine has warned of an emerging “critical” risk to its power grid after President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that repeated Russian bombardments had destroyed one-third of the country’s power facilities as winter approaches.
The warning on Tuesday came as Russian forces claimed to have retaken territory from Ukrainian troops in the eastern Kharkiv region, Moscow’s first announced capture of a village there since being nearly entirely pushed out of the region last month.
At the same time, Russian attacks rocked energy facilities in Kyiv and urban centres across the country, causing blackouts and disrupting water supplies, one day after the capital was bombarded with a swarm of suicide drones.
“The situation is critical now across the country. It’s necessary for the whole country to prepare for electricity, water and heating outages,” Kyrylo Tymoshenko, the deputy head of the Ukrainian president’s office, told Ukrainian television.
The attacks in the early hours of Tuesday hit Kyiv, Kharkiv in the east, Mykolaiv in the south and central regions of Dnipro and Zhytomyr, where officials said hospitals were running on backup generators.
Zelenskyy called the repeated targeting of energy infrastructure “another kind of Russian terrorist attacks”.
“Since October 10, 30 percent of Ukraine’s power stations have been destroyed, causing massive blackouts across the country,” the Ukrainian leader said on Twitter.
Many towns and cities in the Zhytomyr region, west of Kyiv, and parts of the city of Dnipro in central Ukraine were without electricity, while power was restored to the southern city of Mykolaiv after attacks overnight.
“Now the city is cut off from electricity and water supplies. Hospitals are working on backup power,” the mayor of Zhytomyr, Sergiy Sukhomlyn, said in a statement online.
The national emergency services said that after 10 days of attacks on energy facilities, some 1,162 towns and villages in nine regions had been left without power and more than 70 people were killed and 290 injured.
Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko said three people had been killed in Tuesday’s attacks.
Zelenskyy earlier said the new wave of nationwide attacks – which he said had damaged a residential building and flower market in Mykolaiv – was a Russian attempt to “terrorise and kill civilians.”
Source: Aljazeera