Zelensky opens direct line to mayors as strikes hit Ukraine's winter grid

President Volodymyr Zelensky convened the first session of a new direct coordination format with Ukrainian mayors on Friday, 13 November, as Russian strikes on energy infrastructure intensify ahead of the fifth winter of the war.

The meeting covered winter preparedness and energy infrastructure protection, Zelensky said in a Telegram post. He said the format will convene regularly to align local and central government responses to wartime utility disruptions.

Mayors of Kharkiv, Dnipro, Uzhhorod, Ivano-Frankivsk, Chernivtsi, Cherkasy, Mykolaiv and Vinnytsia attended, alongside the acting mayors of Odesa, Zaporizhzhia, Lutsk and Rivne, representatives of local self-government associations and the head of the Kharkiv Regional Council. Participants reviewed municipal budget capacity and mechanisms for supporting vulnerable households during subzero temperatures.

Zelensky demanded unvarnished reporting from local officials, saying that real, prompt information from every region and city must come first, with decisions to follow.

The new format followed his criticism earlier on Friday of prolonged blackouts and misleading official dispatches in the Kyiv region. In his evening video address he called multi-day electricity outages in Bila Tserkva and Brovary "absolutely unacceptable", saying reports from the ground had given a different picture from the conditions residents faced. "Problems must be solved. They must be addressed, not concealed," he said.

Energy executives and diplomats have warned that Russia's winter campaign poses a severe threat to Ukraine's power generation and transmission network. DTEK chief executive Maxim Timchenko told AFP that Russian forces have doubled their deployment of ballistic missiles compared with previous years, concentrating up to seven ballistic missiles, 25 cruise missiles and dozens of drones against single power stations. He said targeting has expanded to high-voltage substations and transmission lines, and that several damaged stations will remain offline until at least next summer.

Also on Friday, Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha met UN humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher in Kyiv and urged UN agencies to prioritise restoring power and heating. A 19 October report by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine concluded that Moscow's systematic assaults on energy infrastructure may amount to crimes against humanity.