Russian strikes cut Ukraine power to hundreds of thousands

Russian strikes on Ukraine's energy infrastructure left hundreds of thousands of people without power on Sunday, Ukrainian authorities and officials said, as the country prepared for another winter of war.

Power company DTEK said more than 600,000 residents in the central Dnipropetrovsk region were without electricity after a night attack damaged important energy facilities. It said restoration work was being complicated by repeated attacks.

In the northeastern Kharkiv region, Zlatopil Mayor Mykola Baksheyev said a Russian drone hit a critical infrastructure facility and left nearly 250,000 customers without power. He said repairs were under way, but the timing for restoring electricity was not yet known.

President Volodymyr Zelensky said the strikes caused widespread outages across Ukraine. He said 140 apartment buildings in the Zhytomyr region were left without heating after a Russian strike, with temperatures already near freezing.

Zelensky also said Russia launched an FPV drone at Komyshuvakha, a village in the Zaporizhzhia region where rescue workers were still searching rubble after an earlier strike on an aid distribution centre. He said the death toll from that earlier attack had risen to 55, up from the emergency services' previous figure of 50, and that more people might still be under the rubble.

The strikes came a day after Ukraine's energy ministry said a large attack on energy facilities had left residents in five regions without power and significantly hampered electricity transmission in Kyiv.

Zelensky has accused Russia of intensifying strikes to pressure Kyiv before US-brokered talks with Russia in Abu Dhabi scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday. Russia has repeatedly struck Ukraine's energy grid during its full-scale invasion.