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Russian strikes have left half of Ukraine’s battered energy grid in need of repair, as concerns mount about the country’s power supply as winter looms.
Some 10 million Ukrainians were without power Friday, according to President Volodymyr Zelensky. That figure accounts for roughly a quarter of Ukraine’s peacetime population — and likely closer to 40% of wartime households.
“Unfortunately Russia continues to carry out missile strikes on Ukraine’s civilian and critical infrastructure. Almost half of our energy system is disabled,” Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said.
In the capital, Kyiv — where temperatures were expected to stay below freezing on Friday — mayor Vitali Klitschko called the situation “critical.”
Roughly half of the city’s civilian population is routinely left without power as the country’s electrical utility institutes planned blackouts to more equitably distribute what’s left of the country’s generating capacity.
That arrangement is expected to continue nationwide, according to grid operator Ukrenergo.
“We need to prepare for possible long outages, but at the moment we are introducing schedules that are planned and will do everything to ensure that the outages are not very long,” Ukrenergo’s head, Volodymyr Kudrytskyi, told Ukrainian state television.
