Kyiv households face up to 20-hour outages as grid strikes deepen

Russian strikes on Ukraine's grid have brought earlier, longer blackouts, and one major power station will stay out of service through at least this winter.

Russia has stepped up its attacks on Ukraine's energy system, and Ukraine has responded with scheduled rolling power cuts. This year's outages began earlier than last winter and are lasting longer. Some Kyiv families face up to 20 hours without power, and officials worry that life becomes unsustainable if supply falls below four hours a day. A Kyiv mother of two, Daryna Kulchytska, describes patterns of two hours of power followed by eight without, and only four or five hours a day recently. Metro trains and trolleybuses in the capital have at times stopped, and hundreds of thousands of people nationwide have lost power in recent weeks.

One of Ukraine's largest power stations, unnamed for security reasons, was knocked offline by a ballistic missile strike at 3am, described as the most powerful attack yet on Ukrainian energy. Repairs are interrupted by air raid alerts every 15 to 30 minutes. DTEK chief executive Maxim Timchenko says attacks have doubled in power and scale compared with last year. He estimates rebuilding will take until at least next summer, since workers get only one to two productive hours a day. The plant's lines will not feed the grid before the end of this winter at the earliest. Russia is also using so-called waiter drones that attach to pylons and cables and are detonated later. Since August, almost daily strikes on power facilities have killed several people each week.

The lesson for abundance is that energy access is only as strong as its weakest link. President Zelensky says Ukraine has enough generating capacity, but damaged lines and substations stop it reaching consumers. When power fails, water, heating and transport fail with it, which is why households describe having no light, water or heat. Shelter, care and safety all depend on the grid.

Watch whether repairs can outpace the strikes, and whether the peace talks under way, with US envoys meeting both leaders on Thursday, change the targeting. Outage figures come from individual residents and officials speaking privately, and the repair timelines are the executives' own estimates.

Source: BBC World