Russian strikes have pushed Ukraine’s power supply close to breaking point, leaving parts of 12 regions in blackout as winter sets in.
The BBC reported that a ballistic missile slammed into one of Ukraine’s largest power stations at around 3am, burying its turbines in rubble and knocking the site completely offline in what it called the most powerful attack yet in Russia’s long campaign against the grid. Ukraine’s energy ministry said that over the past 24 hours Russia had kept up its assault on the country’s energy system.
By the morning of 13 November, parts of 12 regions were without power, among them Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, Dnipropetrovsk and Zaporizhzhia, more than the day before. Hourly cut-off schedules were in force across most of the country, with some areas losing power for long stretches and industry put on tight restrictions. Officials warned the picture could change several times an hour.
Kyiv has been worst hit. At times the metro and trolleybuses have stopped, and some families say they get only a couple of hours of electricity before it vanishes again for the rest of the evening. With temperatures now dropping indoors as well as out, many residents have started leaving the capital, or the country, rather than face months of cold and darkness.
“What is different is the scale of attacks and the different types of weapons used in these attacks,” said Maxim Timchenko, chief executive of DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy firm, who warned that full repairs would take at least until next summer. A control room worker at the bombed plant, Volodymyr Kovalenko, who has spent 25 years on the site, put it more simply. “It was a very powerful attack. We had never experienced anything like it.”
President Volodymyr Zelensky has said the country still has enough generating capacity, and that the real problem is pushing power through lines and substations that keep being smashed. He has described Russia using so-called waiter drones that cling to pylons and cables before detonating. Ukraine, for its part, has hit back at Russian oil refineries deep behind the front.
The barrage landed just as the latest round of United States brokered peace talks wound up, with Russia saying it had launched a massive overnight strike on Ukrainian military factories. The timing, strikes raining down almost in step with the diplomacy, has become grimly familiar to a country heading into another grinding winter of war.
Why the grid became the target
Russia has gone after Ukraine’s power network almost every winter, but this campaign has been heavier and started earlier. Since August the attacks on energy sites have been close to daily, and Ukrainian officials say several power workers have been killed each week trying to keep the lights on.
The fear now is a simple one. Officials have privately warned that life becomes unsustainable for millions if a city cannot hold at least four hours of power a day, and in parts of Kyiv that line is already close. The same pressure is being felt beyond Ukraine’s borders, where our report on NATO jets scrambling over drones in the Baltics showed how the war keeps spilling into neighbouring skies.
Portsmouth And has drawn this account from BBC reporting and statements by Ukraine’s energy ministry and power companies. For the wider picture, our rolling world and UK news is tracking the strikes and the stalled peace talks as the winter deepens.
For now, millions of Ukrainians are counting the hours of light they get each day, and hoping the next missile does not take even those away.
