Russian Strikes Leave 850,000 Ukrainians Without Power Days Before Abu Dhabi Talks

Russian strikes on Ukraine's energy infrastructure left around 850,000 people without electricity on Sunday, as the country heads into another wartime winter with temperatures already around freezing. More than 600,000 residents of the Dnipropetrovsk region lost power after overnight strikes damaged key energy facilities, according to the power company DTEK, and nearly 250,000 customers in the Kharkiv region were cut off after a drone hit critical infrastructure. The blackouts came two days before US-brokered trilateral talks between Ukraine and Russia open in Abu Dhabi.

The scale of the overnight assault was considerable. Ukraine's air force said Russia launched 164 drones, including 112 jet-powered ones, and three guided missiles overnight, and that defences shot down or suppressed 137 of them. DTEK said on Telegram that a night attack had damaged important energy facilities in Dnipropetrovsk and that repairs were being complicated by repeated strikes. The outages reached the city of Dnipro and the Pavlohrad, Samarivskyi and Kamianske districts, and hospitals in the region switched to generators. In Zhytomyr region, strikes hit heat and power facilities in four communities, 140 apartment blocks in the city lost heating, and drones destroyed the Ovruch substation outright, with the city council warning of a long blackout.

The attacks followed a heavier wave a day earlier, when Ukraine's energy ministry said a large attack on energy facilities had left residents in five regions without power and badly disrupted electricity transmission in Kyiv. On the worst night, Saturday 7 November, Russia fired 36 ballistic missiles and Ukraine shot down only four, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, adding that North Korean-made KN-23 missiles had hit a key energy facility. Mr Zelenskyy said Russia had fired 115 missiles, nearly 1,900 guided bombs and more than 3,000 attack drones against Ukraine in the week before 8 November. Russia's defence ministry said its forces would keep striking Ukrainian fuel and energy infrastructure.

The danger extended beyond the grid itself. The Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant — Europe's largest — lost its only working external power line on Saturday, the 330-kilovolt Ferosplavna line, and ran on emergency diesel generators for around ten hours before power was restored on Sunday. The International Atomic Energy Agency said it was the 27th complete loss of external power at the plant during the war. In a separate incident, a Russian drone struck emergency workers at an aid centre in the village of Komyshuvakha, in the Zaporizhzhia region, which had earlier been hit by multiple guided bombs as residents waited for humanitarian aid; Ukrainian authorities said the attack on the village killed at least 55 people.

Mr Zelenskyy has accused Moscow of stepping up the attacks to put pressure on Kyiv before the Abu Dhabi talks, which open on Tuesday, 10 November, and run through Wednesday. The talks, announced by US envoy Steve Witkoff, are to cover post-war security arrangements, de-escalation and humanitarian measures, with Mr Witkoff and Jared Kushner leading the American side. Moscow is reinforcing its delegation, adding Deputy Foreign Ministers Sergei Ryabkov and Mikhail Galuzin, GRU chief Igor Kostyukov and a General Staff representative to a team formally led by presidential adviser Vladimir Medinsky. France's foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, said on Sunday that Europeans would also be represented.

Ukraine, meanwhile, has kept up its own long-range campaign against Russian energy targets. Overnight into Monday, drones struck the industrial zone of Kirishi, setting Russia's Kirishi refinery ablaze around 100 kilometres from St Petersburg. On Reddit, a heavily discussed thread in r/worldnews — more than 12,600 upvotes — covered Mr Zelenskyy's offer to halt strikes on Russian refineries if the United States provides the interceptors Ukraine needs (r/worldnews), a reminder that the energy war is now a bargaining chip on both sides. With Ukraine's grid operator imposing hourly power restrictions in several regions and no date given for full restoration in the worst-hit areas, the talks in Abu Dhabi open with energy — and who can keep the lights on — at the centre of the agenda.