The Russian-installed administration of Kherson blamed the outage on Ukraine, accusing it of attacking the Kakhovka hydroelectric dam.
The Russian-installed administration in Ukraine’s Kherson region has said that Kherson city lost water and power supplies after what it called an act of “sabotage”.
In a statement on Telegram, the Russian-installed administration of Kherson said a “terrorist attack” damaged three power lines in the region.
It said that the attack had been carried out by Ukraine, though it provided no evidence.
The outages are a “result of an attack organised by the Ukrainian side on the Berislav-Kakhovka highway that saw three concrete poles of high-voltage power lines damaged,” it said.
It is the first time that Kherson – which fell to Russian forces within days of Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in February – has seen such a power cut.
Kherson is one of four regions that Russian President Vladimir Putin illegally annexed last month.
Russian state-owned news agency TASS quoted Kherson’s Moscow-appointed governor Vladimir Saldo as saying that there were plans for the city’s power supply to be restored by the end of the day.
Energy specialists were working to “quickly” resolve the issue, the Russian-backed authorities said as they called on people to “remain calm”.
TASS separately cited emergency services in the region as saying that 10 settlements, including Kherson city, which had a pre-war population of 280,000, had been left without electricity.
Russian officials have in recent weeks repeatedly warned civilians to leave Kherson, amid what they say are preparations for a Ukrainian offensive against the city, the only regional capital that Russia has captured since invading Ukraine on February 24.
