Ukraine has announced that power cuts will worsen until the end of July. At issue: a new series of Russian strikes on energy infrastructure. By the winter of 2022-2023, Ukraine had already faced significant cuts.
Ukraine announced on Monday that power cuts would worsen until the end of July, after a series of Russian strikes on its energy infrastructure. Moscow has launched a bombing campaign in recent months, targeting Ukraine’s main electricity production and distribution centers and destroying, according to President Volodymyr Zelensky, half of the country’s energy capacity.
“In the coming weeks, the situation will be much more difficult than it is today,” warned Volodymyr Koudrytskiï, director of the national operator, Ukrenergo. According to the energy supplier, maintenance work at nuclear power plants, bad weather and insufficient electricity imports will intensify already existing shortages, predicting up to 12 hours of outages per day. Volodymyr Kudrytskiï specified that this “situation will continue until the end of July”.
Energy security at the center of the peace plan
kyiv had been forced to call on its European neighbors to import electricity to make up for the deficits in the damaged network. Energy security and the restoration of Ukraine’s electricity grid was one of the 10 points of President Zelensky’s peace plan, discussed at the peace summit in Switzerland last weekend, to which Russia was not invited.
The first campaign of Russian strikes specifically targeting energy sites left millions of Ukrainians without power, water and heating in freezing temperatures in the winter of 2022-2023.