Russia Expands Energy Attacks to Western Ukraine, Outages Hit 12 Regions

Russia has widened its campaign against Ukraine's power grid, striking energy facilities in western regions that officials said had been previously untargeted and leaving consumers without electricity across much of the country.

Deputy Energy Minister Artem Nekrasov said in a televised statement that Russia attacked energy facilities overnight and in the morning in the central Kirovohrad region, in Zhytomyr, Lviv, Rivne, Ternopil and Khmelnytskyi regions in the west, and in the southern region of Odesa. "Unfortunately, the enemy continues to deliberately and systematically attack our energy infrastructure," Nekrasov said.

Ukraine's state grid operator Ukrenergo said the attacks brought new power outages in 12 regions in the morning: Kirovohrad, Zhytomyr, Lviv, Odesa, Rivne, Ternopil, Khmelnytskyi, Zaporizhia, Donetsk, Kharkiv, Sumy and Chernihiv. To protect damaged equipment from overload, the operator said power limitation schedules for industry would apply across all of Ukraine, with hourly outage schedules in some regions.

The west feels the campaign

The strikes mark a shift in geography. For much of the renewed energy campaign, the damage had centered on eastern and central Ukraine. On Tuesday the target list ran deep into the west, close to the borders with Poland and Romania.

In the Lviv region, Governor Maksym Kozytskyi said Russian drones struck an energy facility, and a second drone then hit the same facility again. The extent of the damage there was not immediately clear.

In the south, DTEK, Ukraine's largest private energy company, said an overnight Russian attack hit three of its energy facilities in the Odesa region. The company said 32,700 families remained without electricity and that its crews were working around the clock to restore supply.

A grid under pressure before winter

Russia resumed attacks on Ukraine's energy sector in October, before the start of the cold season, targeting power plants and electricity transmission systems. The country is approaching its fifth winter since Russia launched its full scale invasion in 2022, and each wave of strikes makes the grid harder to repair and harder to balance.

President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Sunday that Russia had attacked Ukraine's energy, oil and gas sectors dozens of times in the week since President Donald Trump announced a halt to attacks on energy infrastructure. Ukraine has said it is ready for an energy ceasefire, but it has also asked its allies to provide missiles able to intercept the Russian ballistic missiles used against the grid.

For households, the immediate effect is simpler than the strategy behind it. Outage schedules decide when homes have light, heat and water pressure, and repair crews can only work as fast as the next alert allows. With the target map now covering the west as well as the east and center, few parts of the country are outside that routine.