A Russian air attack on Ukraine cut heating to half of Kyiv and impacted substations carrying critical power from the country’s atomic plants on Tuesday, prompting Kyiv to warn that Moscow was using the risk of nuclear disaster as a tool of coercion.
Moscow has stepped up a winter campaign against Ukraine’s battered energy system while grinding forward on the battlefield, as Kyiv faces US pressure to secure peace after nearly four years of war, amid scant signs the Kremlin wants to stop fighting.
Russia’s second big attack on the Ukrainian capital this month left 5,635 apartment buildings without heating, said the city’s mayor Vitali Klitschko, amid a cold snap with temperatures as low as minus 15 degrees.
The United Nations’ atomic watchdog said several substations critical for nuclear safety were affected by the attack, while power lines to some other nuclear plants were impacted. Ukraine gets well over half of its electricity from nuclear power.
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The Chernobyl plant, the site of the world’s worst civil nuclear catastrophe, had also lost all off-site power on Tuesday morning, the International Atomic Energy Agency added. Kyiv later said the plant had been reconnected.
Ukrainian officials had warned in recent days that Moscow would target nuclear-related facilities.
“While Russian officials speak about the ‘importance’ of power lines, their forces deliberately strike substations, directly endangering nuclear safety,” said foreign minister Andrii Sybiha.
Grid operator Ukrenergo said Russia’s attack, which Ukraine said had included more than 330 drones and nearly three dozen missiles, targeted both power generation and distribution.
Authorities in the northern region of Chernihiv bordering Russia said 87 per cent of the population was without power.
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Russia said it had attacked military-industrial, energy and transport targets in support of the army.
Tuesday’s strikes followed a new round of peace talks at the weekend between US and Ukrainian officials in a US-backed diplomatic push for which Russia has shown little enthusiasm.
Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy urged the US to pile more pressure on Moscow, saying it had “not yet had the strength” to stop Russia.
“Can America do more? It can, and we really want this, and we believe that the Americans are capable of doing this,” he told reporters in a WhatsApp media chat.
Writing earlier on X, Mr Zelenskiy said some of the Russian missiles fired on Tuesday had been produced this year and called for tougher sanctions on Moscow to curb its military production.
He said he was ready to travel to Davos, where world leaders are gathering for an annual economic forum, if Washington was ready to sign documents on security guarantees for Ukraine and a postwar prosperity plan.
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Kyiv has suffered from severe power and heating outages from repeated Russian strikes, with repair crews working around the clock for more than a week to restore supplies. The cuts have forced residents to adapt amid plunging temperatures, bundling up inside their homes and improvising other ways to stay warm, such as heating bricks or pitching tents indoors.
Energy provider DTEK said more than 335,000 residents had lost power, about half of which had been restored by late morning when temperatures hovered around minus 10 degrees.
Water supplies were disrupted on the left bank of the city of more than three million people, Mr Klitschko said. Authorities said the Vinnytsia, Dnipro, Odesa, Zaporizhzhia, Poltava, Sumy and Rivne regions had also come under attack.
Speaking in Davos on Tuesday, economy minister Oleksiy Sobolev said Russia had damaged about 8.5 gigawatts of power generation capacity since late October.
In his comments to reporters, Mr Zelenskiy said the cost to Ukraine of repelling Tuesday’s strikes was around €80 million, and urged Kyiv’s partners to step up supplies of air defences. – Reuters
