MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 18th November, 2022) Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said that about ten million Ukrainians have been without electricity since Thursday night.
"The mitigation of consequences of the strikes has been underway all day long. As of this hour, 10 million Ukrainians are without electricity. The majority of them are the regions of Vinnytsia, Odessa, Sumy, and in Kiev," Ukrainian news portal Strana.ua quoted Zelenskyy as saying.
Sergey Kovalenko, the head of Ukrainian energy company YASNO (D.Solutions), said earlier in the day that Kiev faced record-breaking emergency blackouts on Thursday.
Dmytro Sakharuk, the CEO of Ukrainian company D.TEK which includes YASNO as a subsidiary, said earlier on Thursday that some 40% of Ukrainian consumers had no electricity.
Ruslan Martsinkiv, the mayor of the Ukrainian city of Ivano-Frankivsk, on Thursday urged citizens living in multi-story buildings to move to the countryside for the winter due to power outages. The mayor claimed that the energy situation will further deteriorate, adding that "it will be very difficult to survive in multi-story buildings."
Russia has been delivering air strikes on Ukraine's military and energy infrastructure since October 10, two days after the bombing of the Crimean bridge took place, which Moscow blames on the Ukrainian special services.
On November 1, Zelenskyy said that about 40% of Ukraine's energy infrastructure had been damaged as a result of these strikes, leading to mass blackouts throughout the country.
