Russian shelling causes power blackouts across Ukraine

Russian forces continue to pound Ukrainian targets with missiles and drones, attacking cities and infrastructure.

Ukraine’s state electricity operator has announced blackouts in the capital, Kyiv, and seven other regions of the country in the aftermath of Russia’s devastating strikes on energy infrastructure.

The move comes as Russian forces continue to pound Ukrainian cities and villages with missiles and drones, inflicting damage on power plants and water supplies, in a grinding war that is nearing its nine-month mark.

Ukrenergo, the sole operator of Ukraine’s high-voltage transmission lines, initially said in an online statement on Saturday that scheduled blackouts will take place in the capital and the greater Kyiv region, as well as several regions around it – Chernihiv, Cherkasy, Zhytomyr, Sumy, Poltava and Kharkiv.

Later in the day, however, the company released an update saying that scheduled outages for a specific number of hours are not enough and instead there will be emergency outages, which could last indefinitely.

Ukraine has been grappling with power outages and disruption of water supplies since Russia started unleashing barrages of missile and drone attacks on the country’s energy infrastructure last month.

The attacks came after Moscow suffered a series of battlefield defeats in northeastern Ukraine and an explosion on the Kerch Bridge, which links occupied Crimea to mainland Russia. The region was illegally annexed by Russia in 2014.

Russia has denied that the drones it has used against Ukraine came from Iran. But Iran’s foreign minister on Saturday for the first time acknowledged supplying Moscow with “a limited number” of drones before Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24.

Hossein Amirabdollahian, however, claimed that Tehran did not know if its drones were used against Ukrainian targets and stated Iran’s commitment to stopping the conflict.

Later on Saturday, Ukraine warned Iran that “the consequences of complicity” with Moscow would be “greater than the benefit”.

“Tehran should realise that the consequences of complicity in the crimes of the Russian Federation’s aggression against Ukraine will be much greater than the benefit of Russia’s support,” foreign ministry spokesman Oleg Nikolenko wrote on Facebook.