Power company head says Ukraine can expect long outages

By BBC Monitoring

The large-scale destruction of energy facilities in Ukraine inflicted by Russia on 15-17 November will entail power outages that may last for up to several days, the Interfax-Ukraine news agency has reported, quoting Dmytro Sakharuk, executive director of the private energy company DTEK.

"It will be days. Unfortunately, we are now talking not about planned power outages, but about planned power-ups in some regions, and there are many of them. Unfortunately, there may be very few hours during which there will be electricity, like for two or three hours a day," he said.

Sakharuk explained that the latest missile attack caused great damage to transmission facilities, such as substations, which transmit electricity from one region to another.

He said that restoration work was underway in some places, while rubble and destroyed equipment was being cleared in others, and that it would be some time before new equipment could be installed at the ruined sites.

According to his calculations, the waves of massive Russian attacks have led to about 40% of Ukrainian consumers experiencing very big problems with power supply.

Source: Interfax-Ukraine news agency, Kyiv, in Russian 1157 gmt 17 Nov 22