By Dan Peleschuk and Yuliia Dysa
Jan 20 (Reuters) – A Russian air attack cut power to more than one million Kyiv residents and impacted substations carrying power from Ukraine’s atomic plants on Tuesday, prompting Ukraine to warn that Moscow was using the risk of nuclear disaster as a tool of coercion.
Moscow has stepped up a winter campaign against Ukraine’s battered energy system while grinding forward on the battlefield, as Kyiv faces U.S. pressure to secure peace after nearly four years of war, amid scant signs the Kremlin wants to stop fighting.
Drone and missile strikes killed four people — three in the southeastern city of Zaporizhzhia and one in the Kyiv region surrounding the capital. Other regions in the east, south and north of Ukraine also came under attack.
The attack was Russia’s second this month on the Ukrainian capital. Tens of thousands of emergency workers have been toiling round the clock to restore power and heating, with overnight temperatures dipping to -13 Celsius (9 Fahrenheit).
“In Kyiv alone, as of this evening, more than one million households remain without power,” President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address. “And a significant number of buildings have no heating, more than 4,000 apartment buildings.”
The president said he wanted his government to provide an “action and decision plan” on stabilising services by Wednesday.
Deputy Prime Minister Oleksiy Kuleba said 68 repair brigades had been deployed in Kyiv. More than 1,400 emergency stations enabled residents to keep warm and charge electronic devices.
The United Nations’ atomic watchdog said several substations critical for nuclear safety were affected by the attack, while power lines to some other nuclear plants were impacted. Ukraine gets well over half of its electricity from nuclear power.
The Chornobyl plant, the site of the world’s worst civil nuclear catastrophe, had also lost all off-site power on Tuesday morning, the International Atomic Energy Agency added. Kyiv later said the plant had been reconnected.
Ukrainian officials had warned in recent days that Moscow would target nuclear-related facilities.
“While Russian officials speak about the ‘importance’ of power lines, their forces deliberately strike substations, directly endangering nuclear safety,” said Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha.
Grid operator Ukrenergo said Russia’s attack, which Ukraine said had included more than 330 drones and nearly three dozen missiles, targeted both power generation and distribution.
Authorities in the northern region of Chernihiv bordering Russia said 87% of the population was without power.
Russia said it had attacked military-industrial, energy and transport targets in support of the army.
NEW STRIKES FOLLOW PEACE TALKS
Tuesday’s strikes followed a new round of peace talks at the weekend between U.S. and Ukrainian officials in a U.S.-backed diplomatic push for which Russia has shown little enthusiasm.
In the Swiss resort of Davos, where the World Economic Forum meetings are taking place, envoys for U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin said their meeting on a possible peace deal to end the war had been “very positive” and “constructive”.
Zelenskiy urged the U.S. to pile more pressure on Moscow, saying it had “not yet had the strength” to stop Russia.
“Can America do more? It can, and we really want this, and we believe that the Americans are capable of doing this,” he told reporters in a WhatsApp media chat.
Writing earlier on X, Zelenskiy said some of the Russian missiles fired on Tuesday had been produced this year and called for tougher sanctions on Moscow to curb its military production.
He said he was ready to travel to Davos if Washington was ready to sign documents on security guarantees for Ukraine and a post-war prosperity plan.
UKRAINE’S POWER GRID FURTHER DAMAGED
The power and heating cuts have forced Kyiv residents to bundle up inside their homes and improvise ways to stay warm, such as heating bricks or pitching tents indoors.
Water supplies, disrupted east of the Dnipro River in the capital for a time, were later restored, Kuleba said.
Speaking in Davos on Tuesday, Economy Minister Oleksiy Sobolev said Russia had damaged around 8.5 gigawatts of power generation capacity since late October.
($1 = 0.8516 euros)
(Additional reporting by Anna Pruchnicka in Gdansk and Olena Harmash in Kyiv; Writing by Dan Peleschuk; editing by Daniel Flynn, Ros Russell, Gareth Jones and Ron Popeski)
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