New power outages in Kyiv and major cities due to Russian attacks

This Friday, Ukrainian authorities announced new continuous blackouts in the country’s largest cities and suburbs, including the capital Kyiv, as Russian troops continue their attacks on energy infrastructure.

Ukraine’s state operator of high-voltage transmission lines, Ukrenergo, said that “emergency shutdowns” of four hours a day had resumed in the Kyiv region.

The region’s governor, Aleksey Kuleba, said on the Telegram social network that residents of the capital can expect “harder and longer” power outages compared to the start of the war, the Associated Press (AP) reported.

The mayor of Kyiv stressed that the city’s energy system is operating in “emergency mode” due to the reduction in electricity supply to half of the pre-war level.

Vitali Klitschko added that he expects Ukrenergo to find ways to cope with the deficit “within two to three weeks, except for circumstances beyond its control.”

In the Kharkiv region in northeastern Ukraine, the governor announced on Telegram the start of daily one-hour power outages from Monday across the region, including in the regional capital, which is Ukraine’s second-largest city.

The measures are “necessary to stabilize the power grid, as the enemy continues to bomb the energy infrastructure,” stressed Oleg Sinegubov.

Across the country, authorities are urging people to conserve energy by reducing electricity consumption during peak hours and avoiding high-voltage appliances.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky last week noted that 30% of Ukrainian power plants have been destroyed since Russia launched the first wave of attacks on this type of infrastructure on October 10.

In Russia, the defense minister told Russian President Vladimir Putin that the military has called up 300,000 reservists since Putin issued a mobilization order last month to reinforce the country’s armed forces in Ukraine.

Putin’s attempts to increase the number of Russian troops stationed along the 1,000-kilometer front line in Ukraine have suffered several setbacks, including the withdrawal of Russian troops from the Karkov region.

The mobilization sparked protests in Russia and prompted tens of thousands of men to flee the country.

Sergei Shoigu also informed the head of the Russian state that 82,000 reservists have been sent to Ukraine, and another 218,000 are being trained.

Putin told Shoigu that the military must ensure that the 300,000 called-up reservists are trained and properly equipped “so that they feel confident when they have to go into battle.”

Russian rocket and artillery attacks have killed at least four people and injured 10 people in the past 24 hours, mostly in the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine, according to the president’s office.

Russian forces are preparing to advance on Bakhmut after a series of setbacks in the east, as well as on Avdeykva, making the entire Donetsk region an “active war zone,” according to Governor Pavel Kirilenko.

Russia’s capture of Bakhmut, which remained in Ukrainian hands during the war, would open the way for the Kremlin to other important Ukrainian strongholds in Donetsk and Donbass.

A renewed offensive in the east could also potentially stall or disrupt Ukraine’s efforts to retake the southern city of Kherson, a gateway to Crimea that Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014.

The military offensive launched on February 24 by Russia in Ukraine has already caused the flight of more than 13 million people – more than six million internally displaced people and more than 7.7 million to European countries – according to the latest UN figures, which rank this migrant crisis as the worst in Europe since World War II (1939-1945).

The Russian invasion, justified by Russian President Vladimir Putin on the need to “denazify” and demilitarize Ukraine for Russia’s security, was condemned by the international community as a whole, which responded by sending weapons to Ukraine and imposing them on Russia. political and economic sanctions.

The UN has presented as confirmed since the beginning of the war, which entered its 247th day this Friday, 6,374 civilians have been killed and 9,776 injured, stressing that these numbers are much lower than the real ones.