Most Ukrainians left without power after new Russian strikes
KYIV, Ukraine — Russia unleashed a new missile onslaught on Ukraine’s battered energy grid Wednesday, robbing cities of power and some of water and public transport, too, compounding the hardship of winter for millions. The aerial mauling of power supplies also took nuclear plants and internet links offline and spilled blackouts into neighbor Moldova.
Multiple regions reported attacks in quick succession and cascading outages. Ukraine’s Energy Ministry said supplies were cut to “the vast majority of electricity consumers.” Lviv’s trams and trolleybuses stopped running as the city in western Ukraine lost both power and water, the mayor said. All of Kyiv lost water, the capital’s mayor said. Power also went out and public transport stopped in Kharkiv, the mayor of that northeastern city, Ukraine’s second largest, said.
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President Volodymyr Zelenskyy instructed Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Nations to request an urgent Security Council meeting.
Addressing it later on Wednesday, Zelenskyy said that Ukraine will put forward a resolution condemning “any forms of energy terror.” Referring to Russia’s likely veto, he said, “it’s nonsense that the veto right is secured for the party that wages this war, this criminal war.”
“We cannot be hostage to one international terrorist,” Zelenskyy said, saying the council must act.
He also invited the U.N. to send experts to examine and evaluate Ukraine’s critical infrastructure.
Three people were killed and 11 wounded in a strike in Kyiv, city authorities said. Another four people were killed and 35 wounded in the wider Kyiv region, its governor said.
“I was going up the escalator, I heard an explosion. Then the electricity suddenly disappeared,” said Kyiv subway passenger Oleksii Kolpachov. “When I got out of the subway, there was a column of smoke.”
Russia has been pounding the power grid and other facilities with missiles and exploding drones for weeks, wreaking damage faster than it can be repaired. Strikes had already damaged around half of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, Zelenskyy said before the latest barrage, and rolling power outages had become the horrid new normal for millions.
