Russian Strikes Leave More Than 600,000 Without Power in Dnipropetrovsk and Nearly 250,000 in Kharkiv Region

Russian strikes on energy facilities overnight left more than 600,000 residents of the Dnipropetrovsk region without power, the DTEK power company said on Sunday, November 8. In the Kharkiv region, a Russian drone hit a critical infrastructure facility in the city of Zlatopil, and nearly 250,000 customers were left without power, Zlatopil mayor Mykola Baksheyev said.

The two figures come from different officials in different regions, and together they point to about 850,000 people and customers without electricity after one night of attacks. Repair work was underway in both regions on Sunday.

Dnipropetrovsk: more than 600,000 without power

DTEK said the night attack damaged important energy facilities in the Dnipropetrovsk region in central Ukraine. "Important energy facilities in the region were damaged in an overnight attack," the company said on Telegram on Sunday.

DTEK said it was working to restore electricity, and that the task was complicated by repeated attacks. The company gave the figure of more than 600,000 residents of the region left without power. It did not give a time for full restoration in the statements reported on Sunday.

Kharkiv region: drone hit in Zlatopil

In the northeast, a Russian drone hit a critical infrastructure facility in Zlatopil, in the Kharkiv region, Baksheyev said on social media. Nearly 250,000 customers in the Kharkiv region were left without power, he said.

Repair work was underway there too, and the exact time for restoring power was still unknown, Baksheyev said. The Kharkiv figure is his figure, reported by AFP, and it counts customers rather than residents, so it is not directly the same measure as the DTEK figure for Dnipropetrovsk.

A second night of energy attacks

The strikes came a day after Ukraine's energy ministry said a massive attack on energy facilities had plunged residents in five regions into darkness and significantly hampered electricity transmission in Kyiv. That earlier attack, on the night of November 6 to 7, was reported by The Orbit Post in its coverage of the ballistic missile barrage on Kyiv.

Ukraine is entering another wartime winter, with temperatures already hovering around freezing. Russia has battered Ukraine's energy grid throughout its invasion, and power cuts in winter hit heating, water and daily life as well as industry.

Talks ahead, and claims from Moscow

President Volodymyr Zelensky has accused Russia of intensifying strikes to put pressure on Kyiv at US-brokered trilateral talks in Abu Dhabi scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday.

Russia's Defence Ministry said on Sunday that its forces had hit a power substation in Ukraine's Zhytomyr region, claiming it supplied electricity to Ukraine's defence industry. The ministry also said it had struck a container ship south-west of the Black Sea port city of Odesa, claiming it was delivering weapons and military equipment to Ukraine. Those are Russian ministry claims, reported by Reuters, and they were not independently confirmed in the reports used for this article.

In a separate report on Sunday, one person was killed in a Ukrainian drone attack on Russia's Kursk region, regional governor Alexander Khinshtein said. The drone hit a tractor in operation in the village of Pervomayskoe, killing a 40-year-old man, he said.