A Ukrainian police vehicle leads an evacuation convoy along a road covered with anti-drone netting in the Zaporizhzhia region after authorities issued a mandatory order to families with children to leave areas near the front line amid constant shelling by nearby Russian forces. Photo by Oleg Movchaniuk/EPA
One million people were without heat or water Thursday in the Dnipropetrovsk region of southern Ukraine after major Russian strikes overnight knocked out key civilian infrastructure, Kyiv said.
Deputy Prime Minister Oleksiy Kuleba said utility providers were working to get the power and water back on for residents across the southeast of the country.
Authorities and energy companies announced that power had been restored to about 200,000 customers in Dnipropetrovsk mid-morning, but advised people to stockpile water and use batteries sparingly as they could not guarantee when services would return fully.
Electricity supply to thousands of people in Zaporizhzhia, to the south, was also cut, but the power was now back on, according to President Volodymyr Zelensky, who said the race to restore services in other cities and communities in his home province, including Kamianske, Kryvyi Rih, Nikopol, and Pavlohrad, was continuing.
“Restoration work has been going on non-stop since last night — crews from all over the region are working. As soon as we restore all critical infrastructure, we will do everything possible to restore power to families as quickly as possible,” said DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy company.
Zelensky condemned the attacks as having no military value and whose only aim was to create misery.
“There is no military sense in such strikes on the energy sector, on infrastructure, which leave people without electricity and heating in winter conditions,” Zelensky said.
Saying Russia was trying “to break Ukraine,” he urged Ukrainians to stay resilient, appealing to Western partners to maintain shipments resupplying Ukraine’s air defenses and not to ease off because just peace talks were underway.
It was unclear exactly which facilities were damaged in the latest strikes but they came amid a sustained morale-sapping campaign targeting the country’s electric power grid, going into the hard Ukrainian winter that Russian forces have recently escalated to include gas.
Gas wells, storage facilities and pipelines and other vital infrastructure have all been targeted in an effort to deprive Ukrainians of any means of keeping warm.
Russia has focused attacks on Ukraine’s electricity network in each of the five winters since it launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022.
