Zelensky rebukes officials over days-long blackouts in Kyiv region

President Volodymyr Zelensky rebuked Ukrainian officials on Friday, Nov. 13, after residents of Bila Tserkva and Brovary in the Kyiv region spent days without electricity while reports from the ground described a different picture.

Zelensky said in his evening address that "the situation in Bila Tserkva and Brovary is absolutely unacceptable," noting that people were left without electricity for several days rather than just hours. "I had a tough conversation with government officials" during the coordination call, he said, adding: "Problems must be solved. They must be addressed, not concealed."

The president demanded immediate action from those responsible for restoring power and said failures by municipal services and individual companies must draw swift responses.

His intervention came as Maxim Timchenko, chief executive of Ukraine's largest private energy company DTEK, warned that Russian strikes on the energy system could do far more damage this winter than last. Timchenko told AFP that "the scale of these attacks is much, much, much bigger" compared to the previous year.

He said Russian forces now concentrate enormous firepower on individual facilities, sometimes launching six or seven ballistic missiles, 25 cruise missiles and dozens of drones against a single power station. Russia is using roughly twice as many ballistic missiles as in previous years, he said, adding pressure to air defences already short of US-made Patriot interceptors.

Targeting has widened to transmission lines and substations, Timchenko said, so working power stations cannot always deliver electricity. "Unfortunately they're successful in these attacks," he said. Several stations struck in recent weeks will stay offline until at least next summer, and others longer.

Timchenko described the strategy as an attempt to create a "humanitarian disaster" and named Kyiv as an "obvious and primary target." Last winter, half of Kyiv's apartment buildings were left without heating at one point as temperatures fell to minus 20 degrees Celsius, millions lost electricity and frozen pipes burst in residential buildings.