Russian shellfire has crashed into the power grid in the southern city of Kherson, Ukrainian officials said on Thursday, cutting power to beleaguered residents and illustrating the problem for Ukraine as it races to restore basic utilities damaged by weeks of Russian strikes.
The attacks are the latest frustration for the city, which sits on the west bank of the Dnipro River. Ukraine reclaimed Kherson on Nov. 11, forcing Russian troops to withdraw to the east bank after a counteroffensive that lasted for months. Since then, Russian forces have fired hundreds of shells across the river at the city.
The authorities have been encouraging residents to leave Kherson, given the lack of power and water in the city, but they have also been racing to reconnect supplies. On Wednesday, the authorities said they had restored power to 20 percent of customers, only for more strikes to reverse the situation.
“There is no voltage in power lines in Kherson,” Yaroslav Yanushevych, the head of the regional military administration, said in a post on the Telegram social messaging app. “This happened because of large-scale attacks on the city by the Russian invaders.”
Russian forces fired 34 shells on Thursday that hit five settlements in the broader region, killing one person and wounding two others, Mr. Yanushevych said, adding that engineers from local power company Khersonoblenergo were again working to restore the power lines.
Russia’s aerial attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure escalated sharply in October as Moscow sustained a series of battlefield losses that military experts say have thwarted its strategy for securing Ukraine’s Black Sea coast and the whole of the eastern Donbas region.
Despite the efforts of Ukrainian engineers, and the support of the European Union and the United States, which have started to deliver both transformers and heavy generators, it will take six months to restore the damaged infrastructure, according to Andriy Herus, head of Ukraine’s committee on energy and housing.
“During this winter it is impossible to restore all the damaged facilities of the energy infrastructure,” Mr. Herus said on Ukraine’s Espresso television channel. “The Ukrainian energy system is under constant Russian fire.”
Ukraine’s European partners were having to manufacture some of the equipment that Ukraine needs, a process that would take six months, he said. At the same time, Ukraine was trying to repair damaged facilities but had instituted a series of rolling blackouts to compensate for the shortages.
This week, the deputy minister of internal affairs, Yevhen Yenin, said on Ukrainian television that a total of 520 cities, towns and villages were facing power supply problems because of the attacks.
Places on the conflict’s front lines, such as the city of Kherson, face a particular problem because they are also subject to local mortar and artillery fire, as well as broader strikes.
The head of the regional military administration in Donetsk, a province in Donbas, told journalists on Wednesday that it was too dangerous for engineers to try to fix the power system in Bakhmut, a city that has been devastated by months of fighting as Russian forces attempt to capture it.
“Aerial power lines are destroyed to the extent that we can count them in kilometers,” said the official, Pavlo Kyrylenko, adding that 1,235 people had been killed by shellfire in the province since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Donetsk in February.
The New York Times
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