“We are doing everything to avoid it. But let’s be honest, our enemies are doing everything so that the city is without heating, without electricity, without water supply, in general, so we all die. And the future of the country and the The future of each of us depends on how prepared we are for different situations,” Mayor Vitali Klitschko told state media. Russia has focused on hitting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure over the past month, causing power shortages and traffic disruptions across the country. Kyiv was scheduled to have hourly rotating blackouts on Sunday in parts of the city and surrounding area. Rolling blackouts were also planned in the neighboring regions of Chernihiv, Cherkasy, Zhytomyr, Sumy, Kharkiv and Poltava, Ukraine’s state energy company Ukrenergo said. Kyiv plans to deploy around 1,000 heating points, but noted that this may not be enough for a city of three million people. As Russia steps up its attacks on the capital, Ukrainian forces advance south. Residents of the Russian-held Ukrainian city of Kherson received warning messages on their phones urging them to evacuate as soon as possible, the Ukrainian military said on Sunday. Russian soldiers warned civilians that the Ukrainian army was preparing for a massive attack and told people to leave immediately for the right bank of the city. Russian forces are preparing for a Ukrainian counteroffensive to retake the southern city of Kherson, which was captured in the first days of the invasion. In September, Russia illegally annexed Kherson as well as three other regions of Ukraine and then declared martial law in the four provinces.
Russian forces in Kherson are “digging”
The Kremlin-installed administration in Kherson has already moved tens of thousands of citizens out of the city. Russia is “occupying and evacuating” Kherson at the same time, trying to convince Ukrainians they are leaving when in fact they are digging in, Nataliya Khomeniuk, a spokeswoman for Ukraine’s Southern Forces, told state television. A Ukrainian woman sits in a car with her family after they fled the Russian-held territory of Kherson on Saturday in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine. (Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty Images) “There are defense units that have dug in there pretty hard, there’s a certain amount of equipment left, firing positions have been set up,” he said. Russian forces are also digging into a hotly contested area in the east, worsening already difficult conditions for residents and the defending Ukrainian military after Moscow illegally annexed and declared martial law in Donetsk province. The attacks almost completely destroyed power stations serving the city of Bakhmut and the nearby city of Solentar, said Pavlo Kyrilenko, the Ukrainian governor of the region. The shelling killed one civilian and wounded three, it said late Saturday. “The devastation is daily, if not hourly,” Kirilenko told state television. Moscow-backed separatists have controlled parts of Donetsk for nearly eight years before Russia invaded Ukraine in late February. Protecting the self-proclaimed separatist republic was one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s justifications for the invasion, and his troops have spent months trying to take over the entire province. While Russia’s “greatest brutality” was concentrated in the Donetsk region, “continuous fighting” continued elsewhere along the front line that stretches more than 1,000 kilometers, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a video address overnight. Between Saturday and Sunday, Russia launched four missiles and 19 airstrikes hitting more than 35 villages in nine regions, from Chernihiv and Kharkiv in the northeast to Kherson and Mykolaiv in the south, according to the president’s office. The strikes killed two people and injured six, the office said. This photo taken on Saturday shows damaged residential buildings after shelling on the outskirts of Kharkiv, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine. (Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP/Getty Images) In the Donetsk city of Bakhmut, 15,000 remaining residents were living under daily shelling and without water or electricity, according to local media. The city has been under attack for months, but the shelling intensified after Russian forces suffered setbacks during Ukrainian counter-offensives in the Kharkiv and Kherson regions. The front line is now on the outskirts of Bakhmut, reportedly led by mercenaries from the Wagner Group, a shadowy Russian military corporation. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the usually under-the-radar founder of the group, is taking a more visible role in the war. In a statement on Sunday, he announced funding and the creation of “militia training centers” in Russia’s southwestern Belgorod and Kursk regions, saying the locals were best placed to “fight sabotage” on Russian soil. The training centers are in addition to a military technology center the group said is opening in St. Petersburg. Elsewhere, the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant has been reconnected to Ukraine’s electricity grid, local media reported Sunday. Europe’s largest nuclear power plant needs electricity to keep its vital cooling systems running, but has been running on emergency diesel generators since Russian bombing cut off its external connections.
