Volodymyr Zelenskyy has urged Ukrainians to start conserving electricity in the wake of Russian missile and drone attacks targeting critical infrastructure, as planned power rationing began across the country on Thursday.
The president said 30 per cent of Ukraine’s power stations had been destroyed, while state energy company Ukrenergo said Russian barrages had caused more damage to the power infrastructure in the past 10 days than in the first seven months of Moscow’s full-blown invasion.
Zelenskyy called on consumers to reduce their energy consumption between 7am and 11pm daily and to refrain from using energy-guzzling home appliances such as water boilers and electric heaters. Ukrenergo told Ukrainians to keep charged phones, power banks, water, flashlights, and batteries to hand.
In a bid to curb the use of electric space heaters, Kyiv’s mayor Vitaliy Klitschko announced the start of the “heating season” on Thursday, just as temperature dipped near freezing. The capital, along with the rest of Ukraine, remains on a centrally controlled heating system that goes back decades.
Ukrenergo on Thursday released a timetable of four-hour blocks in which different areas of Kyiv would go dark to conserve energy.
A Financial Times reporter’s power went out around 1pm local time and came back three hours later. But lights remained on in other districts of the capital. Ukrenergo said it was shutting down larger parts of the country’s central power grid because residents in and around the capital had not cut their energy use sufficiently.
“Dear consumers! The level of electricity consumption is rapidly increasing in the central regions of Ukraine,” the company wrote on Telegram. “The Ukrenergo dispatch centre is forced to introduce a temporary controlled restriction of electricity consumption in this region.”
Ukraine’s energy minister Herman Halushchenko said the government was trying to reduce energy use by 20 per cent, but so far had not reached that target. “We see a drop in consumption,” he said on Ukrainian television. “But it is not enough.”
Ukrainians have broadly shown a willingness to comply with the energy saving demands. In Kyiv, many businesses turned off their neon signs and some kept off all or part of their internal lighting. Very few lights were seen shining from apartment buildings.
Ukraine’s official Twitter account requested of Zelenskyy: “Ask us your famous question again, Mr President.”
“Without electricity or without them?” Zelenskyy replied, referring to Russia.
Hundreds of Ukrainians responded on Twitter with two words in Ukrainian and English: “Without them.”