KYIV, Jan 21 (Reuters) – More than half of Kyiv is still without power a day after Russian strikes on energy facilities, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Wednesday, as Ukrainians struggle through a bitter cold snap.
Many of Kyiv’s residents have been living in cold apartments with only a few hours of electricity a day – or sometimes none at all – since a recent surge in Russian attacks on a grid battered by nearly four years of missile and drone strikes.
“As of this morning, about 4,000 buildings in Kyiv are still without heat, and nearly 60 percent of the capital is without electricity,” Zelenskiy wrote on X.
The temperature in the capital was minus 12 degrees Celsius (10.4 degrees Fahrenheit) on Wednesday morning, although it climbed slightly by the afternoon.
Some residents complained on social media of being without electricity or heating for more than a day.
In the eastern region of Kharkiv, where the energy system has also been heavily bombarded, Governor Oleh Syniehubov said 520,000 consumers were without power on Wednesday, down on Tuesday’s figure of more than a million.
He said Kharkiv region’s energy infrastructure was attacked again on Wednesday.
In the southern region of Odesa, energy company DTEK said one of its facilities had been badly damaged in the morning, depriving several thousand households of power.
Even when some power is restored to households, they face rolling blackouts for most of the day, as a significant chunk of Ukraine’s power generation capacity has been taken out by Moscow.
The outages have seriously affected Ukraine’s cellular services, with the CEO of Ukraine’s largest mobile provider Kyivstar saying that just under 10% of their grid was not working.
(Reporting by Max Hunder and Yuliia Dysa; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
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