Power Outages Hit Crimea and Kherson After Ukrainian Strikes

The city of Sevastopol in Russian-annexed Crimea and Moscow-held parts of Ukraine’s Kherson region faced power outages on Wednesday after further Ukrainian attacks on energy infrastructure, Kremlin-installed authorities said.

Sevastopol, the largest city on the Crimean Peninsula, was left without power after Ukrainian strikes hit energy facilities, the city’s Russian-installed governor, Mikhail Razvozhayev, wrote on Telegram.

Razvozhayev said earlier that Sevastopol was under drone attack. Vladimir Saldo, the Moscow-installed governor of the Russian-held parts of Kherson, separately reported partial or complete power cuts in areas under his control, but gave no further details.

Kyiv has intensified strikes on supply routes to Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014, following a fuel supply crisis that had already led to restrictions on public life. Razvozhayev said trolleybuses in Sevastopol would not operate on Wednesday and asked parents to keep their children at home.

Russia’s Orenburg region, more than 1,000 km south-east of Moscow, shot down several drones over an industrial facility, Governor Yevgeny Solntsev wrote on Telegram. It was not immediately clear whether any damage had occurred in the region, which borders Kazakhstan and is home to several industrial sites, including a gas processing plant and an oil refinery.

In Russia’s border region of Belgorod, a man was killed and a woman was injured in a drone attack, local authorities said. Separately, Russian shelling of the eastern Ukrainian city of Balakliia killed one person on Wednesday, local officials wrote on Telegram.

Reuters could not independently verify the details of the latest strikes.

(Reuters, mja)