Following another wave of Russian missile and drone strikes early Friday targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, nearly a million people in the Ukrainian capital were left without power, as temperatures dropped to 10 degrees Fahrenheit that night.
Earlier in the week, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had warned that more than half of the city already had no electricity in the wake of Russian strikes on energy facilities, News.Az reports, citing The Washington Post.
Russia’s renewed pressure on Kyiv has fractured a power grid already weakened by years of war, with Ukrainian power company Ukrenergo acknowledging the energy situation had “significantly worsened,” forcing emergency outages across most regions.
Oleksandr Kharchenko, a Kyiv-based energy expert and the director of the Energy Industry Research Center, said the latest phase of Russia’s campaign has exposed a familiar weakness in a new way. The same energy facilities have been targeted repeatedly throughout the war, but attacks now arrive with such intensity that Ukraine’s air defenses cannot reliably blunt the impact.
“The situation is extremely complicated,” Mr. Kharchenko said. “We lost a significant amount of generation capacity, including inside Kyiv, which is critical both for electricity and for heating.”
According to Mr. Kharchenko, the damage is less about improved Russian targeting and more about sheer volume. “They attacked the same facilities they have targeted many times before,” he said. “The difference is the scale. It was never 18 missiles in one wave that could reach their targets.”
Ballistic missiles, which are harder to intercept, have played a particularly destructive role. When even a small number get through, they can disable equipment that then takes weeks or longer to replace.
