Power was restored to over 800,000 residents in Kyiv on Saturday, a day after Russia launched major attacks on the Ukrainian power grid that caused blackouts across much of the country, and European leaders agreed to proceed towards using hundreds of billions of frozen Russian assets to support Ukraine’s war effort.
Ukraine’s largest private energy company, DTEK, said “the main work to restore the power supply” had been completed, but that some localised outages were still affecting the Ukrainian capital following Friday’s “massive” Russian attacks.
Russian drone and missile strikes wounded at least 20 people in Kyiv, damaged residential buildings and triggered blackouts across swaths of Ukraine early on Friday.
Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko described the attack as “one of the largest concentrated strikes” against Ukraine’s energy infrastructure.
Russia’s Defence Ministry on Friday said the strikes had targeted energy facilities supplying Ukraine’s military. It did not give details of those facilities, but said Russian forces used Kinzhal hypersonic missiles and strike drones against them.
Ukraine’s air force said on Saturday that its air defences intercepted or jammed 54 of 78 Russian drones launched against Ukraine overnight, while Russia’s defence ministry said it had shot down 42 Ukrainian drones over Russian territory.
At least two people were killed and five wounded in airstrikes on Kostiantynivka, a city in Ukraine’s Donetsk region on Saturday, regional Governor Vadim Filashkin said.
Ukraine’s energy sector has been a key battleground since Russia launched its all-out invasion more than three years ago.
Each year, Russia has tried to cripple the Ukrainian power grid before the bitter winter season, apparently hoping to erode public morale.
Winter temperatures run from late October through March, with January and February the coldest months.
Zelensky said in his nightly address on Friday that Russia was taking advantage of the world being “almost entirely focused on the prospect of establishing peace in the Middle East,” and called for strengthening Ukraine’s air defence systems and tighter sanctions on Russia.
“Russian assets must be fully used to strengthen our defence and ensure recovery,” he said in the video, posted to X.
Meanwhile, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said in a joint statement on Friday they were ready to move towards using “in a coordinated way, the value of the immobilised Russian sovereign assets to support Ukraine’s armed forces and thus bring Russia to the negotiation table.”
The statement added they aimed to do this “in close cooperation with the United States.”
Ukraine’s budget and military needs for 2026 and 2027 are estimated to total around 130 billion euros ($153 billion).
The European Union has already poured in 174 billion euros (about $202 billion) since the war started in February 2022.
The biggest pot of ready funds available is through frozen Russian assets, most of which is held in Belgium - around 194 billion euros ($225 billion) as of June - and outside the EU in Japan, with around $50 billion, and the US, the United Kingdom and Canada with lesser amounts.
Earlier, 23 Ukrainian children and adolescents were brought out of Russian-occupied areas of the country to territory under Kyiv’s control, Zelensky’s chief of staff said.
Andriy Yermak, writing on the Telegram messaging app, said the rescue was carried out under the president’s “Bring Kids Back UA” programme aimed at bringing to safe areas children deported to Russia or confined to Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine.
Yermak said those returning included two sisters who refused a demand to attend Russian schools made by Russia-installed authorities who had threatened to remove the girls from their mother’s care.
Agencies