KYIV (Reuters) – Basic services were being restored in Ukraine’s capital Kyiv after the latest wave of Russian air strikes on critical infrastructure, as residents navigated a city gripped by fog and girded for a holiday season marked by uncertainty.
Mayor Vitali Klitschko said a quarter of Kyiv remained without heating but that the metro system was back in service and all residents had been reconnected to water supply by early morning.
Only around one-third of the city remained without electricity, he said, but emergency outages would still be implemented to save power. “Because the deficit of electricity is significant,” he wrote on the Telegram messaging app.
Ukrainian officials said Russia fired more than 70 missiles on Friday in one of its heaviest barrages since the Kremlin’s Feb. 24 invasion, forcing emergency blackouts nationwide.
Ukraine has managed to restore power to almost 6 million people in the last 24 hours, President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a video address.
“Repair work continues without a break after yesterday’s terrorist attack. ... Of course, there is still a lot of work to do to stabilize the system,” he said.
“There are problems with the heat supplies. There are big problems with water supplies,” Zelensky added, saying Kyiv as well as Vinnytsia and Lviv further to the west were experiencing the most difficulty.
Earlier this month, Kyiv Mayor Klitschko had warned of an “apocalypse” scenario for the capital if Russian air strikes on infrastructure continued, though he also said there was no need yet for people to evacuate.
“We are fighting and doing everything we can to make sure that this does not happen,” he told Reuters on Dec. 7.
Power was also restored throughout the eastern city of Kharkiv on Saturday, regional governor, Oleg Sinegubov said, after the strikes left Ukraine’s second city without electricity.
Moscow says the strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure are a response to an explosion on the Kerch bridge connecting the Russian mainland to the Crimean peninsula.
Russia’s war on Ukraine started in late February with Moscow saying that it was aimed at defending the pro-Russian population in the eastern Ukrainian regions of Luhansk and Donetsk against persecution by Kyiv.
Ever since the beginning of the war, Ukraine’s Western allies, including the European Union and the U.S., have been pumping the ex-Soviet republic full of advanced weapons and slapping Russia with a slew of sanctions. Moscow says such measures will only prolong the war.
Moscow has responded to EU’s decision to impose sanctions on Russia by imposing reciprocal bans on the bloc.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry has said EU’s “illegitimate unilateral restrictive measures” would not achieve their goal.