U.N. deputy spokesman Farhan Haq said U.N. humanitarian officials in Ukraine report that “right now, there are power outages in every region of Ukraine” and some regions including Lviv in the west, Zaporizhzhia and Odesa in the south, Vinnytsya and Dnipro in the center have been completely disconnected from electricity while Kyiv has been left without electricity in most areas and without water across the entire city.
Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko said Wednesday that “one of the capital’s infrastructure facilities has been hit” and there were “several more explosions in different districts” of the city. He said water supplies were knocked out in all of Kyiv.
The Energy Ministry said the attacks also caused a temporary blackout of most thermal and hydroelectric power plants, and also affected transmission facilities. Staff were working to restore supply, “but given the extent of the damage, we will need time,” it said on Facebook.
The blackouts also caused “the largest internet outage in Ukraine in months and the first to affect neighboring Moldova, which has since partially recovered,” said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis at network-monitoring Kentik Inc.
Kyiv resident Oleksii Kolpachov told The Associated Press that he heard an explosion as he was going up an escalator out of the subway.
“Then the electricity suddenly disappeared. When I got out of the subway, there was a column of smoke,” Kolpachov said.
The onslaught came hours after Ukrainian authorities said an overnight Russian rocket attack in Vilniansk, close to the city of Zaporizhzhia, destroyed a hospital maternity ward in southern Ukraine, killing a 2-day-old baby.
Many doctors in the city are working in the dark, unable to use elevators to transport patients to surgery and operating with headlamps, cell phones and flashlights. In some hospitals, key equipment no longer works.
“Breathing machines don’t work, X-ray machines don’t work … There is only one portable ultrasound machine and we carry it constantly,” said Volodymyr Malishchuk, head of surgery at a Kherson children’s hospital.
