Russian ‘terrorism’ leaves more than 4m Ukrainians without power

President Zelensky has accused the Kremlin of “energy terrorism” for leaving 4.5 million Ukrainians without power as Russia attacked the country’s electricity grid.

Ukraine is being forced to ration electricity use after large-scale missile and drone attacks on power plants and sub-stations.

At least nine civilians were killed and 16 wounded in Russian attacks on Ukraine over the previous 24 hours, Zelensky’s office reported yesterday. The Ukrainian leader said that about 4.5 million consumers had been “temporarily disconnected from energy consumption”.

In Moshchun, a village near Kyiv, Valentina Levtsun, 56, lives alone in a two-floor home where she now has no electricity, heating or water. She cooks her food on a bonfire in the garden and uses an old, unreliable generator to power her phone. “It’s cold now all the time,” she said. “I don’t know how I’m going to get through the winter if something doesn’t change.”

Zelensky said that over the past month a third of Ukraine’s power stations had been destroyed, leading to the imposition of planned power cuts in an effort to reduce the country’s overall power use by 20 per cent.

He said President Putin was also trying to raise pressure on European states, with the war leaving consumers facing heavy bills and potential blackouts. “Moscow will present any winter difficulties in propaganda as alleged proof of the failure of a united Europe,” Zelensky said. “So together we must prove to the terrorists that failure is a word about them, not about Europe.”

At a meeting in Germany, foreign ministers of the leading G7 countries agreed to create a co-ordinating mechanism to aid Ukraine to “repair, restore and defend its critical energy and water infrastructure” before the winter. There were also discussions about which individual countries could provide the weaponry Ukraine needs to fend off more drone and missile attacks.

The escalation in strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure, which began on October 10 in retaliation for an attack on the Kerch bridge linking Russia to the occupied Crimean peninsula, has come as Ukraine’s military attempts a counteroffensive in the southern occupied region of Kherson. A Russian-installed official in southern Ukraine said that Moscow would probably pull its troops back from the west bank of the Dnipro river in Kherson and urged civilians to leave.

“Most likely our units, our soldiers, will leave for the left [eastern] bank,” Kirill Stremousov, deputy civilian administrator of the Kherson region, said in an interview with Solovyov Live, a pro-Kremlin online media programme.

Speaking in Moscow, Putin said that civilians should be evacuated from the area. Taking part in an event to mark Russia’s Unity Day, he claimed that a military conflict in Ukraine had been inevitable and that if Russia had not initiated it in February, “everything would be the same [now], only with a worse position for us”.

Russia’s defence ministry said that it was evacuating more than 5,000 civilians a day to the left bank of the Dnipro.

In a remarkable outburst, Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of Russia’s security council and a former president of the country, suggested Russia was fighting an existential battle against “a part of the world that is dying”.

That opponent was made up of “a bunch of crazy Nazi drug addicts”, “a big pack of barking dogs from the Western kennel”, and “a motley farrow of grunting piglets and dim-witted philistines from a collapsed Western empire”, Medvedev wrote online.

 The Pentagon is to pay for the Czech Republic to upgrade 45 Soviet-era T-72 tanks for use in Ukraine, as part of the US’s latest $400 million package of military aid. The Netherlands will fund the refurbishment of 45 Czech T-72 tanks. All the tanks will arrive by the end of the year.