More Than 850,000 Ukrainians Lose Power as Russia Hits Grid Before Abu Dhabi Talks
Strikes on Dnipropetrovsk and Kharkiv regions followed a massive overnight attack that blacked out five regions; Zelenskyy says Moscow is applying pressure ahead of U.S.-brokered talks.
More than 850,000 people across eastern Ukraine were without electricity on Sunday after Russian attacks on energy facilities, the latest blows to a power system that Kyiv fears will not survive another winter of war intact.
In the eastern Dnipropetrovsk region, more than 600,000 people lost power after an overnight Russian strike on an energy facility, according to the Ukrainian energy provider DTEK. Residents across the Pavlohrad, Samarivskyi and Kamianske districts, and the city of Dnipro, faced outages. DTEK said in a Telegram post that engineers were working to restore the damaged facility but that "repairs are being complicated by repeated attacks." Another 250,000 people in the Kharkiv region in the northeast were left without power after Russia struck an infrastructure facility there. No casualties were reported, according to Mykola Baksheyev, mayor of Zlatopil.
The strikes followed a much larger assault a day earlier. Ukraine's Energy Ministry said a massive attack on energy facilities on Saturday plunged residents in five regions into darkness and significantly hampered electricity transmission in Kyiv. Attacks continued into the morning of Monday, according to Ukrainian authorities. Energoatom, the state nuclear operator, said the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, which Russia occupies, was again receiving external power from the Ukrainian grid after its 16th complete loss of off-site power this year.
The timing is political. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused Russia of intensifying its attacks to put pressure on Kyiv at United States-brokered trilateral talks in Abu Dhabi, scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday. He described the campaign as an attempt to plunge the country into darkness. Russia's Ministry of Defence said on Telegram that its forces will "continue to carry out strikes against Ukrainian fuel and energy infrastructure facilities" that it says are used to aid the Ukrainian military.
Ukraine is hitting back at Russia's energy sector too. Ukrainian officials have said that their forces struck another Russian oil refinery over the weekend, continuing a campaign against fuel supplies that Moscow relies on to run its military. Neither side has shown signs of pausing the exchange of energy strikes ahead of the talks.
Ukraine's grid operator has said Russian attacks have damaged nearly every large thermal and hydroelectric station in the country, leaving repair crews racing from one emergency to the next. Rolling outages of up to 12 hours were reported in parts of Kyiv after the latest wave, according to Ukrainian media accounts, though outlets differ on the precise scale. With winter approaching and temperatures dropping, each strike on a substation or generating plant leaves hospitals, water systems and district heating more dependent on backup supplies, and it adds urgency to what Ukrainian negotiators hope to extract from the talks in the United Arab Emirates.
