The Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, has been plunged into a widespread blackout, with electricity, water, and heating supplies cut across large parts of the city of some 3 million people following another night of Russian drone strikes.
The outage comes after a request from the state-owned electricity transmission system operator Ukrenerho to reduce consumption and comes on top of regular hours-long power cuts introduced during the war in order to conserve remaining electricity supplies. The company said in a statement on social media that it was working to restore services.
The news comes as temperatures are set to fall as low as minus 15 degrees Celsius over the weekend with city authorities saying they had set up around 1,200 warming centers.
The most recent cuts come after days of heavy Russian attacks on Ukraine.
On January 9 a massive missile and drone attack on Kyiv killed four and left 26 wounded. 20 residential buildings were also damaged, including one housing the Qatari Embassy, in one of the largest attacks on the capital in months.
Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko later confirmed that this barrage had left half of all apartment blocks in Kyiv without heating and urged all citizens of the city to leave if they could due to all the outages.
Commenting on the recent Russian attacks on January 9, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said “Moscow is trying to use cold weather as a tool of terror”
The UN Security Council will meet January 12 to discuss Ukraine. The move comes after Ukraine’s UN ambassador, Andriy Melnyk, said in a letter to the Security Council that “The Russian Federation has reached an appalling new level of war crimes and crimes against humanity by its terror against civilians.”
Russia denies intentionally targeting civilians in Ukraine despite widespread evidence to the contrary since launching its full-scale invasion in February 2022.
