Power outages in Ukraine after Russian attacks on infrastructure

KIEV, Ukraine – Ukraine imposed an emergency power shutdown across much of the country on Sunday, a day after Russia launched large-scale attacks on energy infrastructure and claimed to have made progress in the eastern province of Donetsk.

Power outages were in effect in all but three regions of Ukraine following a drone and missile attack on energy targets on Saturday that injured at least 19 people.

The Ukrainian state-owned electricity grid operator Ukrenergo said the shutdowns would affect both industrial and private customers.

Sustained Russian attacks on Ukraine’s power grid in recent weeks forced the government to impose nationwide blackouts. But without adequate air defenses to fend off attacks and carry out repairs, shortages could worsen as demand increases in late summer and the bitter winter.

The most serious recent attacks included a barrage in April that damaged Kyiv’s largest thermal power plant and a massive attack on May 8 that targeted power generation and transmission facilities in several regions.

Following Saturday’s barrage, the Ukrainian Air Force announced on Sunday that air defenses had shot down all 25 drones launched overnight.

Russia claimed on Sunday that it had taken control of the village of Umanske in the partially Russian-occupied Donetsk region.

Russia’s new coordinated offensive is focused on Ukraine’s northeastern Kharkiv region, but it also appears to include tests of Ukrainian defenses in Donetsk further south and incursions into the northern regions of Sumy and Chernihiv.

In Russia, six people were injured in an artillery attack in the town of Shebekino in the Belgorod region on the border with Ukraine, the region’s governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said on Sunday. He also said a local official, the deputy head of Korochansky district, was killed by “the detonation of ammunition.” He did not give details.

In the neighboring Kursk region, three people were injured on Sunday when an explosive device was dropped from a drone, said acting regional head Alexei Smirnov.

At Asia’s most important security conference in Singapore on Sunday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused China of helping Russia disrupt an upcoming peace conference on the war in Ukraine organized by Switzerland.

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