Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Sunday that Russia was responsible for power cuts affecting large areas of eastern Ukraine and accused Moscow of deliberately hitting civilian infrastructure.
“A total power outage in the Kharkiv and Donetsk regions, a partial one in the Zaporizhia, Dnipropetrovsk and Sumy regions,” Volodymyr Zelensky wrote in a statement on social media, blaming “Russian terrorists.” “No military installations” affected, he added. “The goal is to deprive people of light and heating.”
Shortly before him, local authorities reported Russian shelling of strategic infrastructure that led to power cuts in large areas of eastern Ukraine, where kyiv launched a counter-offensive that broke through Russian lines .
Power cuts affect territories where millions of people lived before the war.
“The Russians hit the energy infrastructure”
The governor of the Kharkiv region (northeast), where kyiv claimed the greatest territorial gains during its counter-offensive, said on social networks that the Russian army had “hit critical infrastructure” in the region and its eponymous capital. According to Oleg Sinegoubov, “there is no more water or electricity in several towns. The emergency services are trying to control the fires on the sites that have been hit”.
The governor of the Dnipropetrovsk region (center-east), Dmytro Reznichenko, also blamed the Russians for the power cuts in his area. “Several cities and towns in the Dnipropetrovsk region are without electricity. The Russians have hit the energy infrastructure. They cannot come to terms with their defeat on the battlefield,” he said.
His counterpart in the Sumy region (east) said the water and electricity cuts affected at least 135 towns and villages in his jurisdiction.
AFP journalists in Kramatorsk, in the Donetsk region (east), confirmed that the cuts also affected this city, one of the largest in the east still under Ukrainian control. The regional governor also reported cuts elsewhere in his area.