As they struggle to maintain an electricity grid heavily damaged by Russian missiles, officials in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv say they have begun planning for a once-unthinkable possibility: a complete blackout that would require the evacuation of the city’s approximately three million remaining residents.
The situation is already so dire, with 40 per cent of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure damaged or destroyed, that municipal workers are setting up 1,000 heating shelters that can double as bunkers while engineers try to fix bombed-out power stations without the needed equipment.
To try to keep the grid from failing altogether, Ukraine’s national energy utility said Saturday that it would continue to impose rolling blackouts in seven regions.
The tremendous strain on Ukraine’s ability to provide power is the result of the widespread bombardment by Russian forces of critical energy infrastructure across the country.
The damage caused by the Russian strikes has forced officials to reckon with the possibility that further damage could render them unable to provide basic services.
“We understand that if Russia continues such attacks, we may lose our entire electricity system,” Roman Tkachuk, the director of security for the Kyiv municipal government, said in an interview, speaking of the city.
Officials in the capital have been told that they would probably have at least 12 hours’ notice that the grid was on the verge of failure. If it reaches that point, Mr Tkachuk said, “we will start informing people and requesting them to leave.”
“If there’s no power, there will be no water and no sewage,” he said. “That’s why currently the government and city administration are taking all possible measures to protect our power supply system.”
On Saturday, Ukraine’s national electric utility, Ukrenergo, confirmed the need to continue rolling blackouts to “reduce the load on the networks, ensure sustainable balancing of the power system and avoid repeated accidents after the power grids were damaged by Russian missile and drone attacks.”
The cuts would affect Kyiv and its environs, and the regions of Chernihiv, Cherkasy, Kharkiv, Poltava, Sumy and Zhytomyr, the utility said. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.