Snow to blanket Kyiv as Russian attacks target power supplies | Russia-Ukraine war News

Snow is expected to hit the Ukrainian capital on Sunday and will continue until midweeks with freezing temperatures.

Heavy snowfall is expected to hit Kyiv – with temperatures dropping below freezing point day and night – as millions of people still living in and around the Ukrainian capital struggle with little access to electricity and heat.

Snow is expected on Sunday in Kyiv, a city that had 2.8 million residents before the war, and will continue until midweek with temperatures forecast to stay below freezing.

Ukraine’s power grid operator Ukrenergo said on Saturday that electricity producers were able to cover only three-quarters of consumption needs, necessitating restrictions and blackouts across the country.

Sergey Kovalenko, chief operating officer of YASNO, which provides energy to the capital, said the situation in the city had improved but remained “quite difficult”. He indicated that residents should have at least four hours of power per day, and said those receiving less than that amount should contact his agency.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said six million people were without power across the country on Friday after the latest Russian bombardment left them without light, water or heat.

In a rare public spat involving Ukrainian leaders, Zelenskyy on Friday criticised the mayor of Kyiv for doing what he said was a poor job setting up emergency shelters to help those without power and heat after Russian attacks.

The United States has accused Russia of wanting to “freeze” Ukraine into submission since it has failed to triumph on the battlefield.

“President [Vladimir] Putin seems to have decided that if he can’t seize Ukraine by force, he will try to freeze it into submission,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said earlier this month.

Ukraine’s state-run nuclear energy firm, Energoatom, said last week that the power units of three Ukrainian nuclear power plants were switched off after Russian missile hits across the country.

Since October, Russia has been targeting Ukraine’s power and heating systems with long-range missiles and drones. Moscow says the aim is to reduce Kyiv’s ability to fight and push it to negotiate.

On Saturday, Ukraine remembered the victims of a Soviet-era famine that killed millions of Ukrainians in the winter of 1932-33.

The remembrance day for the ”Holodomor”, which was established after the country gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, falls on the fourth Saturday of November and is commemorated by the placing of candles in the windows of Ukrainian homes.

The Holodomor, which roughly translates as “death by hunger”, has taken on an increasingly central role in Ukrainian collective memory since the Maidan revolution in 2014 removed a Russian-backed president and bolstered national consciousness.

Pope Francis this week compared Russia’s war in Ukraine with what he called the ”terrible genocide” of the Stalin era and said Ukrainians were now suffering from the ”martyrdom of aggression”.