By Anna Prachnica and Olena Hermash
Jan 20 (Reuters) – President Volodymyr Zelensky urged the United States to put more pressure on Russia after recent airstrikes in Ukraine brought temperatures down in half of the capital and affected substations vital to nuclear safety for the United Nations nuclear watchdog.
Russia has intensified its winter campaign against Ukraine’s energy system and is advancing on the battlefield, as Kiev confronts the US. Pressed to secure peace after nearly four years of war, the Kremlin wants to stop the fighting.
Moscow’s second major attack this month in Kiev left 5,635 apartment buildings without heating, city mayor Vitaly Klitschko said amid a chill that saw temperatures drop below minus 15 Celsius (5 Fahrenheit).
Tuesday’s attack also follows a new round of peace talks between US and Ukrainian officials over the weekend in a US-backed diplomatic push for which Russia has shown little enthusiasm.
Zelensky said the US “still doesn’t have the power” to stop Russia, saying the Trump administration could step up pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin if it wanted to.
“Can America do more? It can, and we really want it, and we believe Americans are capable of it,” he told reporters in a WhatsApp media chat.
Writing earlier in X, Zelensky said Tuesday that some of the Russian missiles were produced this year and called for stricter sanctions on Moscow to curb its military production.
He said he was ready to visit Davos, where world leaders gather for the annual economic forum, if Washington is ready to sign Ukraine’s security guarantees and post-war prosperity plan.
A new Russian attack disrupts the power grid
Ukraine says Russia launched more than 330 drones and nearly three dozen missiles overnight, most of which were shot down. Russia said it carried out military-industrial, energy and transport targets with military support.
The International Atomic Energy Agency said several substations critical to nuclear safety were affected by the attack, while power lines at some other nuclear plants were affected. Ukraine gets more than half of its electricity from nuclear power.
Ukraine’s Chornobyl plant, the site of the world’s worst civilian nuclear disaster, also lost all off-site power on Tuesday morning, the agency added.
Kiev has suffered severe power and heating outages from repeated Russian attacks, with repair crews working 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 at most of the higher elevations that lost heat on Tuesday was only restarted after earlier strikes on Jan. 9, Klitschko said.
Energy provider DTEK said more than 335,000 residents had lost power, half of which had been restored by late morning when temperatures hovered around minus 10 Celsius.
One person was injured, debris damaged a school building and disrupted water supplies in the Left Bank of the city of more than 3 million people, Klitschko said.
Regional officials said one person was killed and two petrol pumps were damaged outside the capital. Officials said the regions of Vinnytsia, Dnipro, Odesa, Zaporizhia, Poltava, Sumy and Rivne were also hit by the attacks.
Speaking in Davos on Tuesday, Finance Minister Oleksiy Sobolev said Russia had lost about 8.5 gigawatts of power generation capacity since the end of October.
In his remarks to reporters, Zelensky said it cost Ukraine about 80 million euros ($94 million) to repel Tuesday’s strike and urged Kiev’s partners to increase air defense supplies.
($1 = 0.8516 euros)
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