Kyiv prepares for a winter without heat, water or electricity

The mayor of Kyiv warned residents to prepare for the worst this winter if Russia continues to crack down on the country’s energy infrastructure.

This means that the possibility that the Ukrainian capital will have no electricity, water or heat in the severe cold cannot be ruled out.

“We are doing everything we can to avoid this,” Mayor Vitali Klitschko said.

“But frankly, our enemies are doing everything they can to leave this city without heat, electricity, water, and in general, we’re all dead. The future of the country and the future of each of us depends on how we feel about different readiness for the situation.”

About 4.5 million people are without electricity, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a video address to the nation on Sunday night.

He appealed to Ukrainians to bear hardships and stand hard work, saying: “We must get through this winter, and spring is stronger than now.”

Last month, Russia has focused on cracking down on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, causing blackouts and blackouts across the country.

Parts of Kyiv and surrounding areas were without power on a rotating hourly basis on Sunday.

Ukraine’s state-owned energy operator Ukrenergo said rolling blackouts were also planned in the Chernihiv, Cherkasy, Zhitomyr, Sumy, Kharkov and Poltava regions.

Kyiv plans to deploy around 1,000 heating points, but it is unclear whether this will be enough for a city of 3 million.

Residents of the Russian-occupied Ukrainian city of Kherson received warning messages on their mobile phones urging them to evacuate as soon as possible, the Ukrainian military said on Sunday.

Russian soldiers warned civilians that Ukrainian troops were preparing for a massive attack and told people to go immediately to the city’s right bank.

Russian troops are preparing for a Ukrainian counteroffensive to retake the southern city of Kherson, which was captured early in the invasion.

In September, Russia illegally annexed Kherson and three other regions, followed by the declaration of martial law in four provinces.

The Kremlin-installed government in Kherson has moved tens of thousands of civilians out of the city.

“There is a fairly strong defensive force there, a certain amount of equipment has been left, firing positions have been set up,” she said.

After Moscow illegally annexed Donetsk province and declared martial law, Russian troops are also digging in a competitive region in the east, exacerbating already difficult conditions for residents and defending Ukrainian troops.

The region’s Ukrainian governor Pavlo Kirilenko said the attack almost completely destroyed a power station serving the city of Bakhmut and the nearby city of Soledar.

He reported Saturday night that the shelling killed one civilian and wounded three.

“The vandalism is daily, if not hourly,” Mr Kyrylenko told state television.

The protection of the separatists’ self-proclaimed republic was one of the reasons for the invasion by Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose forces spent months trying to capture entire provinces.

From Saturday to Sunday, Russia fired four missiles and 19 airstrikes, hitting cities from Chernihiv and Kharkiv in the northeast to Kherson and Nepal in the south, according to Zelensky’s office. More than 35 villages in 9 districts of Gulayev. The strike left two dead and six injured.

In the Donetsk city of Bakhmut, the remaining 15,000 residents live under fire every day, without water or electricity, according to local media.

The city has been under attack for months, but the bombardment started to heat up after Russian troops suffered setbacks in Ukraine’s counteroffensive in the Kharkiv and Kherson regions.

The front lines are now on the outskirts of Bakhmut, where mercenaries from the mysterious Russian military company Wagner Group are reportedly leading the charge.

The training centers are in addition to the military-technical center the organization said it would open in St. Petersburg.

Dmytro Chubenko, a spokesman for the district attorney’s office, told local media that in Kharkiv, officials were trying to find bodies found in mass graves after the Russians were evacuated.

He said DNA samples had been collected from 450 bodies found in a mass grave in the city of Izium, but the samples needed to be matched with relatives, and only 80 had been involved so far.

In a piece of good news, the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant has been reconnected to Ukraine’s power grid, local media reported on Sunday.

Europe’s largest nuclear power plant needs electricity to maintain a vital cooling system, but it has been running on emergency diesel generators since Russian shelling cut its external connections.