Kyiv went into emergency blackouts on Wednesday for the first time since spring, after Russia launched its largest combined missile and drone assault on Ukraine’s energy grid in months. Ukrainian officials say seven people died across the country, and a key power plant near the capital was damaged.
President Volodymyr Zelensky, speaking during a visit to the eastern front, said one of the dead was a child and that critical infrastructure had been hit in five regions, with damage recorded in five more. Ukraine’s air force reported intercepting five missiles and 155 drones, and air-raid sirens sounded for more than 12 hours.
What went offline in and around Kyiv
The state-owned producer Centrenergo said generating equipment at the Trypilska thermal power plant in Kyiv region was damaged. The national grid operator, Ukrenergo, responded by ordering emergency outages in the capital and in the Kyiv, Chernihiv and Zhytomyr regions. DTEK, Ukraine’s biggest energy company, carried them out in Kyiv and reminded customers that normal outage timetables do not apply to emergency cuts, as France 24’s report on the emergency cuts describes.
The effects showed up in daily life. Some trams and trolleybuses in Kyiv stopped running as people tried to travel home from work. On Thursday, Ukrenergo reported outages across a wider band of the country, from Kharkiv in the east through Chernihiv and Sumy in the north to Rivne and Kirovohrad, and urged households to move heavy electricity use into daytime hours.
Moscow’s account of the operation is narrower than Kyiv’s. Russia’s defence ministry said it used ground-launched precision weapons and attack drones against Ukrainian energy sites, a communication centre in Kyiv and port infrastructure at Izmail in the Odesa region. HCN could not independently verify those descriptions of the targets.
The human toll
Zelensky gave a national death toll of seven civilians and said around two dozen more were wounded, without breaking the figures down by region. Authorities said a 14-year-old was among the dead. In Kyiv, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said a worker for the city’s heating utility died when a warehouse in the Solomianskyi district was struck, Interfax-Ukraine reported.
Why Ukraine’s energy grid is the target again
Prime Minister Serhii Koretskyi said no combined strike of this scale had happened since the last heating season ended, and described near-daily attacks on energy sites since the summer. Reuters reported that many Ukrainians now expect a winter of attacks designed to leave cities cold and dark while the country is short of air defences.
Memories of last winter are fresh. Attacks then, in temperatures that fell as low as minus 20 Celsius, left power and heating systems badly damaged. Strikes on Ukrainian energy sites are also long-running: the energy ministry had counted more than 1,000 of them between October 2022 and October 2024, which is why officials stress the scale of this single wave rather than its novelty.
Russia links the campaign to Ukrainian attacks on its own fuel and energy sector. Its defence ministry said in late August that it was preparing a bombardment of Ukrainian energy infrastructure in response, while Ukraine has hit Russian oil refineries and online retailers. Zelensky has said that without an energy truce, Kyiv would make the winter difficult for Russia too.
What is still unknown
Neither Kyiv nor Moscow has released a full damage assessment. In the reports HCN reviewed, officials had not said how many customers lost power or how long repairs at Trypilska would take, and the death toll may change. Ukrenergo said its crews were working to reconnect consumers as fast as possible.
The attacks continued after the main assault. Overnight into Thursday, an Odesa business centre was hit and one person was injured, local authorities said, and Zelensky said a Kyiv school was struck. HCN will update this article as verified details emerge. For related security coverage, see HCN’s report on the US troop deployment and carrier strike group tied to Iran.