The mayor of Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, is advising citizens to be ready for the worst this winter if Russia continues to attack the nation’s energy infrastructure; this means the possibility of going without heat, water, or power in the bitterly cold weather cannot be ruled out.
“We are taking every precaution to prevent this. But let’s face it, our adversaries are doing everything in their power to ensure that the city lacks heat, electricity, and water supplies in general so that we all perish. And how well-prepared we are for various eventualities will determine both the future of the nation and the future of each of us, Mayor Vitali Klitschko told state media.
Over the past month, Russia has concentrated on attacking Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, resulting in power shortages and rolling blackouts throughout the nation. Kyiv was scheduled to have hourly rotating blackouts Sunday in parts of the city and the surrounding region.
According to Ukraine’s state-owned energy company, Ukrenergo, rolling blackouts were also anticipated in the surrounding Chernihiv, Cherkasy, Zhytomyr, Sumy, Kharkiv, and Poltava districts.
Kyiv intends to set up around 1,000 heating spots, but acknowledged that this could not be sufficient for a city with a population over 3 million.
Ukrainian forces are making progress in the south as Russia steps up its airstrikes on the capital. According to Ukraine’s military, warning letters were sent to residents of the Russian-occupied Ukrainian city of Kherson, advising them to leave as soon as possible. Russian troops instructed citizens to immediately flee to the city’s right bank after warning that Ukraine’s army was prepared for a significant onslaught.
In order to retake the southern city of Kherson, which was taken during the early stages of the invasion, Russian forces are preparing for a Ukrainian counteroffensive. Kherson and three other Ukrainian territories were forcibly annexed by Russia in September, and martial law was subsequently imposed across the four provinces.
Tens of thousands of citizens have already left Kherson under the Kremlin-installed government.
According to Nataliya Humenyuk, a spokeswoman for Ukraine’s Southern Forces, Russia has been “occupying and evacuating” Kherson at the same time, pretending to be leaving while they are actually burrowing in.
There are defence units that have set up strong defensive positions, she continued, and some equipment and fire positions have been left behind.
As a result of Moscow’s illegitimate annexation of Donetsk province and imposition of martial law there, the already difficult situation for locals and the defending Ukrainian army is getting worse. Russian forces are now entrenching themselves in a hotly contested region in the east.
The power plants that supply Bakhmut and the neighbouring town of Soledar have been all but destroyed as a result of the strikes, according to Pavlo Kyrylenko, the Ukrainian governor of the area. He reported late Saturday that one civilian was killed and three were injured in shelling.
The devastation, according to Mr. Kyrylenko, “takes place every day, if not hourly.”
Before Russia invaded Ukraine in late February, rebels supported by Moscow had been in charge of a portion of Donetsk for over eight years.One of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s justifications for the invasion was to defend the separatists’ self-declared republic there, and his troops have spent months attempting to take the entire region.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine, stated in his nightly video address that while Russia’s “most cruelty” was concentrated in the Donetsk region, “continuous fighting” continued everywhere along the front line that spans more than 1,000 kilometres (620 miles).
According to the president’s office, between Saturday and Sunday, Russia launched four missiles and carried out 19 airstrikes, damaging more than 35 villages in nine different regions, from Chernihiv and Kharkiv in the northeast to Kherson and Mykolaiv in the south. According to the office, two individuals were killed and six were injured in the strikes.
According to local media, the remaining 15,000 people of Bakhmut, a city near Donetsk, were subjected to daily shelling and were without power or water. Months of shelling have been directed towards the city, but it has intensified as a result of Russian forces suffering losses during Ukrainian counteroffensives in the Kharkiv and Kherson districts.
The front line is now on Bakhmut’s outskirts, where mercenaries from the Wagner Group, a shadowy Russian military company, are reported to be leading the charge.
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the group’s founder who has generally operated invisibly, is now playing a more prominent part in the conflict. He said in a statement on Sunday that he would fund and establish “militia training facilities” in the southwest Russian districts of Belgorod and Kursk since the people there were most equipped to “fight against sabotage” there. In addition to the military technology centre that the organisation announced it will open, the training facilities in St. Petersburg.
According to Dmytro Chubenko, a spokesman for the regional prosecutor’s office, authorities in Kharkiv were seeking to identify victims discovered in mass graves following the Russian withdrawal.
DNA samples from 450 bodies found in a mass grave in the city of Izium have been obtained, but only 80 persons have agreed to participate in the matching process.
One glimmer of good news is that, as local media reported on Sunday, the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant has been restored to Ukraine’s power system. The most important cooling systems at Europe’s largest nuclear reactor require electricity to operate, but since Russian shelling destroyed its outside connections, it has been powered by emergency diesel generators.