A rocket and drone blitz has shut down a third of the country’s power plants in just eight days as winter approaches, President Volodymyr Zelensky said. Further drone strikes on energy supplies left parts of the capital without electricity for hours yesterday. At least three residents were killed.
Officials said 1,162 towns or villages in 16 Ukrainian regions are now without power.
Zelensky said Vladimir Putin’s attack on power supplies, a crime under the laws of armed conflict, “caused massive power cuts,” forcing hospitals to support generators.
“There is no more room for negotiations with Putin’s regime,” Zelensky said, once again ruling out the prospect of peace talks with the Kremlin despot. “The terrorist state will not change anything for itself with such actions,” he added.
“It will only confirm its destructive and murderous essence, for which it will certainly be held accountable.”
The main power plant in the central city of Dnipro, the gateway to Ukraine’s partially occupied industrial heartland, the Donbas, was also affected. And Zhytomyr, home to military bases and important industries west of Kiev, was out of power.
Mayor Serhiy Sukhomlyn said 150,000 of the 250,000 residents were still without electricity last night.
Pavlo Raboschuk, a 33-year-old computer repairman in Zhytomyr, said he was ready “for a hard and dark winter” with dehydrated food, warm clothes and batteries he had stored at home. “Only swear words come to my mind,” he added.
Iryna Kolodzynska, a school principal, managed to get the students back to their desks within 30 minutes of the airstrike. “We mustn’t break down,” she said. “There are regions that have suffered much more from the war than we have.”
