Eastern Ukraine suffers blackout, Kyiv blames Russia

 

Ukraine’s eastern region has suffered a ‘total blackout’ a day after a counter-attack by Kyiv’s troops forced the Russian army to retreat from large tracts of the Kharkiv region, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accusing Moscow of deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure.

Ukrainian officials said water facilities and a thermal power station in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second biggest city, were deliberately targeted, causing power outages and cuts in water supplies.

“No military facilities, the goal is to deprive people of light & heat,” Zelenskyy wrote on Twitter late on Sunday, describing the Russians as “terrorists”.

As many as nine million people in the region, including in territory controlled by Russia, could be affected.

“There is no electricity or water supply in several settlements. Emergency services are working to control fires at the sites that were hit,” Oleg Synegubov, the governor of the Kharkiv region, said in a statement on social media.

Similar reports came in the evening from the regions of Sumy, Dnipropetrovsk, Poltava, Zaporizhzhia and Odesa.

“We were on the streets when [the power outage] happened and as we were driving back to our location, everything was completely dark; there was not one light on. It was quite an eerie scene.”

Officials in the Sumy, Dnipropetrovsk and Poltava regions said shortly after the electricity cut announcements that power had been restored.

The Russian attacks were also disrupting railways, with the national train service announcing delays throughout the east including in Kharkiv.

Ukraine’s foreign ministry spokesman Oleg Nikolenko said the Russian attacks were an “act of desperation following Russia’s immense losses and retreat in eastern Ukraine.”

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References:

BBC News, CNN News, NDTV , The News, Al-Jazeera, CNBC, Economist, Times of India, Sky sports, New York Time, Sky News, Indianexpress