Russian attacks on energy infrastructure left about 850,000 people without electricity in Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk and Kharkiv regions on Sunday, Al Jazeera reported, citing a power company and a local official.

More than 600,000 people lost power after an overnight strike on an energy facility in the eastern Dnipropetrovsk region, energy provider DTEK said on Telegram. Outages affected the Pavlohrad, Samarivskyi, Kamianske and Dnipro districts, as well as the city of Dnipro.

DTEK said engineers were working to restore the damaged facility, but “repairs are being complicated by repeated attacks”.

Another 250,000 people were left without electricity in the northeastern Kharkiv region after a Russian strike on an infrastructure facility, according to the report.

Zlatopil Mayor Mykola Baksheyev said on Telegram that no casualties had been reported following that attack. Engineers were repairing the damage, he said, but the timing of power restoration remained unknown.

The strikes followed an announcement by Ukraine’s Ministry of Energy on Saturday that a large-scale attack on energy facilities had caused outages in five regions and significantly hampered electricity transmission in Kyiv.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has accused Russia of intensifying attacks to pressure Kyiv ahead of United States-brokered trilateral talks scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

Russia’s Ministry of Defence said its forces would continue striking Ukrainian fuel and energy infrastructure that it claims supports Ukraine’s military.

Sources