More than 600,000 residents in Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region were left without electricity after overnight strikes damaged energy facilities, utility company DTEK said Sunday. The company said repair work was underway, but repeated attacks were complicating efforts to restore power.
In the northeastern Kharkiv region, Zlatopil Mayor Mykola Baksheyev reported that a Russian drone hit critical infrastructure. He said nearly 250,000 customers in the region had lost electricity, according to CBS News.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the attacks caused widespread outages across the country. In the Zhytomyr region, 140 apartment buildings were left without heating, he said, as temperatures were around freezing.
Rescue operations continue after Zaporizhzhia strike
Zelenskyy also said a Russian FPV drone struck Komyshuvakha, a village in the Zaporizhzhia region, while emergency crews were still searching the rubble of an aid distribution centre hit earlier in the week. He put the death toll from that attack at 55, up from the 50 previously reported by emergency services, and said more people could remain trapped.
The latest outages followed a separate attack reported by Ukraine’s Energy Ministry on Saturday. That strike affected energy facilities in five regions and significantly disrupted electricity transmission in Kyiv, according to The Associated Press.
Ukrainian officials said the attacks came ahead of trilateral talks with Russia scheduled for the following week.
Reid Bentley