This article was originally published by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and is reprinted with permission.
A senior aide to Ukraine’s president said on November 24 that electricity has been restored to all regions of Ukraine, although supplies to cities including the capital remain severely restricted and efforts continue to connect households, while efforts to restore water supplies are also ongoing following one of Russia’s worst missile attacks on civilian infrastructure in the nine-month invasion.
In Kyiv, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said late on November 24 that 60 percent of the city still had no electricity.
He said water supplies, hospitals, and public transport were priorities and intervals were being reduced between subway trains to help residents cope.
“Power engineers are currently working in critical conditions. The system is gradually being restored,” Klitschko said.
Hours earlier, the deputy head of the Office of the President Kyrylo Tymoshenko said “all regions” had at least some electricity and “the first thing that was restored were critical infrastructure facilities.”
Tymoshenko added via Telegram that “As of now, the connection to the network of household consumers is gradually proceeding.”
Tymoshenko cited the deployment of 4,000 specially equipped hotspots to charge phones, warm up, and drink warm beverages had been set up, describing them as “points of invincibility.”
As the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine enters its 10th month, Moscow’s war planners have kept up their intensified missile attacks on civilian infrastructure and are said to be focusing on holding positions in the east and southeast of the country.
Ukrainian authorities said the massive missile attacks on the capital, Kyiv, and other settlements killed six people and injured dozens more.
The November 23 missile attacks caused Kyiv’s biggest outages since the war began on February 24.
The damage to Ukrainian infrastructure also cut off power to neighboring Moldova, which is heavily reliant on gas and energy supplies routed through Ukraine.
“Energy engineers and specialists worked all night” to restore the electricity and water supplies, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko wrote on Telegram.
The power was restored in most parts of the city within hours of the three nuclear power plants still under Ukrainian control being reconnected to the electricity grid, helping ease supply problems.
The water supply was restored in about half of Kyiv on the left bank of the Dnieper River during the morning, Klitschko said.
The Russian military fired about 67 cruise missiles and 10 drones during the November 23 attack, according to Kyiv, mostly targeting the energy infrastructure and piling more damage onto Ukraine’s already battered power network.
It added to the misery for civilians as the temperature plunged below zero degrees Celsius overnight in a city that had 2.8 million residents before the war.
In the Poltava region, power has already been restored for 15,500 people and 1,500 legal entities, Governor Dmytro Lunin said. Water supplies resumed in several parts of the city of Poltava, and four boiler stations have started to heat hospitals, he added.
In the Dnipropetrovsk region, power has been restored early on November 24 for up to 50 percent of consumers, according to Governor Valentyn Reznichenko. But he noted that “the situation with energy is complicated.”
