By Anna Pruchnicka and Olena Harmash
Jan 20 (Reuters) – President Volodymyr Zelenskiy urged the U.S. to pile more pressure on Russia after its latest air attack on Ukraine cut heating to half of the capital and impacted substations the U.N.’s atomic watchdog said are vital for nuclear safety.
Russia has stepped up a winter campaign against Ukraine’s 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.
Moscow’s second major attack on Kyiv this month left 5,635 apartment buildings without heating, said the city’s mayor Vitali Klitschko, amid a cold snap with temperatures as low as minus 15 Celsius (5 Fahrenheit).
Tuesday’s strikes also 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.
Zelenskiy said the U.S. has “not yet had the strength” to stop Russia, saying the Trump administration could still boost pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin if it wanted to.
“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, where world leaders are gathering for an annual economic forum, if Washington was ready to sign documents on security guarantees for Ukraine and a post-war prosperity plan.
NEW RUSSIAN ATTACK HITS HOBBLED POWER GRID
Ukraine said Russia had launched more than 330 drones and nearly three-dozen missiles overnight, most of which had been downed. Russia said it had attacked military-industrial, energy and transport targets in support of the army.
The International Atomic Energy Agency said several substations critical for nuclear safety were impacted by the attack, while power lines to some other nuclear plants were affected. Ukraine gets well over half of its electricity from nuclear power.
Ukraine’s Chornobyl plant, the site of the world’s worst civil nuclear catastrophe, had also lost all off-site power on Tuesday morning, the agency added.
Kyiv has suffered from severe power and heating outages from repeated Russian strikes, with repair crews working around the clock for more than a week to restore supplies.
The cuts have forced residents to adapt amid plunging temperatures, bundling up inside their homes and improvising other ways to stay warm, such as heating bricks or pitching tents indoors.
Heating to most of the high-rises that lost heat on Tuesday had only just resumed after previous strikes on January 9, said Klitschko.
Energy provider DTEK said more than 335,000 residents had lost power, around half of which had been restored by late morning when temperatures hovered around minus 10 Celsius.
One person was wounded, debris damaged a school building, and water supplies were disrupted on the left bank of the city of more than 3 million people, Klitschko said.
Regional officials said one person was killed outside the capital and two petrol stations damaged. Authorities said the Vinnytsia, Dnipro, Odesa, Zaporizhzhia, Poltava, Sumy and Rivne regions had also come under attack.
Speaking in Davos on Tuesday, Economy Minister Oleksiy Sobolev said Russia had damaged around 8.5 gigawatts of power generation capacity since late October.
In his comments to reporters, Zelenskiy said the cost to Ukraine of repelling Tuesday’s strikes was around 80 million euros ($94 million), and urged Kyiv’s partners to step up supplies of air defences.
($1 = 0.8516 euros)
(Reporting by Anna Pruchnicka in Gdansk and Olena Harmash and Yuliia Dysa in Kyiv; Writing by Dan Peleschuk; editing by Daniel Flynn and Ros Russell)
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