Power cuts roll across Ukraine as Russian attack threat from Belarus grows

Ukrainians endured rolling power cuts as Moscow continued to target their energy system, and Kyiv warned of a growing risk of renewed attack by Russian troops from the territory of Belarus, one of the Kremlin’s few close allies.

“About 40 per cent of total [electricity] infrastructure is seriously damaged. Repair and connection work continues, but today and tomorrow we should expect outages,” said Oleksandr Kharchenko, a senior adviser at Ukraine’s energy ministry.

He said Ukrainians had reduced electricity consumption by about 10 per cent following recent waves of Russian missile and drone attacks on the national grid but urged people to aim for a 20 per cent cut “to provide critical help to our energy system”.

State electricity utility Ukrenergo warned of planned blackouts across the country of 40 million from 7am to 10pm on Thursday, as staff worked to stabilise the national grid and repair damaged infrastructure.

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“At the same time, it is getting colder outside, which traditionally encourages us to use more electricity. But we need to be very conscious and frugal with our electricity consumption to get through the coming winter as best we can,” the firm said on social media.

Kyiv mayor Vitaliy Klitschko announced that the capital would turn on its centralised heating system on Thursday – a Soviet-era network that provides heat to most of the city’s apartment blocks – in part to discourage people from using their own electric heaters.

“Even a small … reduction of electricity use in each residence will help stabilise the national grid. I also ask entrepreneurs, owners of advertising spaces, shops, cafes and restaurants to save as much as possible on lighting signs and screens,” he said, adding that buses would replace electric trolleybuses on many routes around Kyiv.

Missiles hit energy infrastructure in the eastern industrial city of Kryvyi Rih in the early hours of Thursday and schools in the city of Mykolaiv and in the Zaporizhzhia region, which is one of four Ukrainian provinces that Russia now claims as its own.

“We will not let Moscow’s latest escalation go unanswered… Scorched earth tactics will not help Russia win the war. They will only strengthen the unity and resolve of Ukraine and its partners,” German chancellor Olaf Scholz told his country’s parliament.

The European Union agreed on Thursday to sanction three Iranian generals and an Iranian arms firm over the country’s provision of explosive “kamikaze” drones to Russia, even as Moscow and Tehran continued to deny the existence of such an arrangement.

In a gaffe on Russian television, Ruslan Pukhov, the head of Moscow’s Centre for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, told interviewers – apparently unaware that he was live on air – that “we all know they [the drones] are Iranian but the authorities have not admitted it.”

Moscow appointees in the partly occupied Kherson region of southern Ukraine said about 15,000 people had been evacuated to the eastern side of the Dnieper river as Kyiv’s troops put increasing pressure on Russian forces on the western bank.

Ukraine’s military is also closely monitoring the arrival of thousands more heavily armed Russian troops in Belarus.

“The threat of the Russian armed forces resuming the offensive on the northern front is growing,” said Ukrainian brigadier general Alexei Gromov, adding that Russia may try to attack western Ukraine to cut weapons supplies from Nato states.

UK defence secretary Ben Wallace revealed that a Russian fighter jet had fired a missile close to a British surveillance plane over the Black Sea late last month, but said it was a “malfunction” rather than a “deliberate escalation” by Moscow’s military.