Russia attacked electrical power facilities in much of Ukraine, including the country’s largest hydroelectric plant, causing widespread outages, officials said Friday.
Energy Minister German Galushchenko said the nighttime drone and rocket attacks were “the largest attack on the Ukrainian energy sector in recent times. The goal is not just to damage, but to try again, like last year, to cause a large-scale disruption of the country’s energy system.”
The attacks caused a fire at the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station, which supplies electricity to the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, Europe’s largest nuclear power installation.
The main 750-kilovolt power line to the plant was cut off, International Atomic Energy Agency head Rafael Grossi said early Friday. A lower-power backup line was working, he said.
The plant is occupied by Russian troops, and fighting around the plant has been a constant concern because of the potential for a nuclear accident.
The dam at the hydroelectric station was not in danger of breaching, the country’s hydroelectric authority said. A dam breach could not only disrupt supplies to the nuclear plant but would potentially cause severe flooding similar to what occurred last year when a major dam at Kakhovka further down the Dnieper collapsed.
Russian missiles, drone and artillery have struck energy facilities in multiple cities today including Kharkiv, Zaporizhzhia, Vinnytsia, Khmelnytskyi,and Kryvyi Rig.
Attacks on energy facilities in the Kharkiv region caused blackouts, and other attacks were reported in areas of western Ukraine far from the front lines. There were power outages due to the strikes in Dnipro. Installation in Kryvyi Rih in the Dnipropetrovsk region were also hit.
“The world sees the targets of Russian terrorists as clearly as possible: power plants and energy supply lines, a hydroelectric dam, ordinary residential buildings, even a trolleybus. Russia is fighting against the ordinary life of people,” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Friday on the Telegram messaging app.
(With inputs from AP))
