Tens of thousands of people were left without power and heating in southern Ukraine after Russian attacks on the frontline city of Kherson and Ukraine’s largest seaport, Odesa, authorities and a top energy provider said yesterday.
Russia has sharply increased its attacks on Ukraine’s energy and utilities sector as winter approaches, plunging swathes of cities and regions into darkness.
State oil and gas firm Naftogaz said a heat and power plant in the southern city of Kherson had been ‘almost completely destroyed’. Regional governor Oleksandr Prokudin said the attack left 40,500 customers without heat.
“This is a purely civilian facility providing heat to residents,” Naftogaz CEO Sergii Korteskyi wrote on X. “Such targeted bombing is terrorism.”
Kherson, a frontline city that was for several months occupied by Russian forces after Moscow’s invasion in February 2022, comes under Russian missile, drone and artillery attack on an almost daily basis.
Separately, Ukrainian energy company DTEK said that Russia attacked its energy facility in the southern Odesa region overnight, leaving 51,800 households without power.
In Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region, where Russian forces are grinding forward in the battlefield, attacks left about 60,000 residents without power, Kyiv’s energy ministry said.
The French President and German Chancellor have voiced scepticism over the direction that US efforts to negotiate a peace between Ukraine and Russia are taking, German magazine Spiegel cited a transcript of a confidential call as showing.
In a report, Spiegel said that in the call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and other European leaders, France’s Emmanuel Macron warned that the United States could insist that Ukraine makes territorial concessions to Russia without guarantees to prevent future Russian aggression.
“There is a chance that the US will betray Ukraine on territory without clarity on security guarantees,” he said, according to the magazine.
In the call that took place on Monday, Germany’s Friedrich Merz warned Zelenskiy that US negotiators are ‘playing games’ and that he should be ‘very careful’ over the next few days, the Spiegel report said.
Berlin declined to comment, while the French President’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“The President did not express himself in these words,” Spiegel quoted the Élysée as saying.
When asked to comment, French foreign ministry spokesman Pascal Confavreux told reporters at a briefing: “I don’t see myself commenting on alleged leaks. There can be no doubt about our support for Ukraine and the intensity of our exchanges with the American side.”
European leaders on Monday rallied to show support for Zelenskiy after US-Ukrainian talks to revise a peace proposal that initially favoured Russia.
Russian President Vladimir Putin received US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner in the Kremlin on Tuesday.
On Wednesday, US President Donald Trump said the path ahead for peace talks was unclear after what he called “reasonably good” talks the Kremlin talks.
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