Ukrainians face power outages lasting up to eight hours on Wednesday, as their country faces severe damage to power plants due to ongoing Russian attacks.
President Volodymyr Zelensky, speaking Tuesday at a conference on Ukraine’s reconstruction, said Russia had destroyed half of his country’s electricity generation capacity since it began attacking energy facilities in late March.
Residents of the capital, Kiev, with a population of three million, face some of the most significant energy shortages. The hum of generators echoes throughout the city, while at night the streets are often shrouded in darkness.
Families with young children living on the upper floors of apartment buildings were left without working elevators, leaving them to climb dozens of flights of stairs.
Ukraine buys energy from the European Union to try to cover its shortage. The Energy Ministry said on Wednesday it plans to import the largest amount of energy yet. However, this is not enough to make up the deficit, meaning a nationwide power outage has been planned over an eight-hour period, from 3pm to 11pm, in order to protect critical infrastructure such as hospitals and military facilities.
The situation is expected to worsen as temperatures rise in the summer and people turn on air conditioning units.
If Russia continues to attack power plants, the worst-case scenario is that come winter, Ukrainians could spend up to 20 hours a day without electricity or heat, according to Ukraine’s largest private energy company DTEK. Part of the problem is that repairing thermal and hydroelectric power plants in Ukraine is difficult and expensive.
“Some of them will take years to repair, and others may never work again,” said Maria Tsatorian of Ukrainergo, Ukraine’s national energy operator.
Overnight, Russia launched missile and drone attacks across Ukraine, including the capital, Kiev, where the sound of air defenses could be heard in the early hours of the morning.
The army commander in Kiev, Serhiy Popko, said that the city’s air defense systems were unable to bypass anything. However, an energy facility in the northeastern Sumy region was damaged in the attack.
Oleg Strelka, of the State Emergency Service in Sumy, told the BBC that one effect of the prolonged power outage was that people were plugging in all their electrical appliances at the same time as soon as the electricity came back on, causing fires. “Over the past month, we have rescued children and the elderly from smoke-filled homes,” he said.
Zelensky told Western countries that he needs seven more advanced air defense systems, called Patriot, in order to protect cities and energy infrastructure in Ukraine. According to American media, Washington agreed to send another such system to Ukraine in the coming days.
The Ukrainian government is preparing to hold a global peace summit in Switzerland this weekend, which aims to bring together as many countries as possible to support the 10-point peace plan, which centers on Russia’s withdrawal from all Ukrainian territory. More importantly, Russia was not invited, and influential countries including China, and perhaps Brazil and South Africa, will not attend.
Aware of the limitations of the conference, President Zelensky’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, said yesterday that Ukraine hopes to build a broad platform of support first, before exploring the possibility of holding a second summit, to which Russia will be invited.
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