Russia launched drone attacks on Ukrainian energy facilities, causing outages across several regions, as reports warn of a planned winter campaign targeting critical infrastructure to force Ukraine’s capitulation.
Russian forces launched a massive drone attack on energy facilities in several regions overnight and in the morning, the national power grid operator Ukrenergo reported on Telegram.
According to the company, the attack caused new power outages by morning in Kyiv, Volyn, Odesa, Zaporizhzhia, Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv, Sumy, and Chernihiv regions. This was reported by Radio Svoboda.
Ukrenergo added that emergency repair and restoration work had already begun in areas where the security situation allowed it.
Energy officials said that to prevent overloading equipment damaged by previous Russian attacks, power consumption restrictions for industrial consumers and hourly power outage schedules affecting all categories of consumers (covering up to two outage groups) would be introduced in some regions through the end of the day.
In light of the consequences of Russian strikes and weather conditions, energy officials urged consumers to limit their use of high-power electrical appliances between 4 p.m. and 10 p.m.
In early October, The New York Times published an account of the Kremlin’s strategy to “freeze” Ukraine’s population, reporting that Russia was preparing to launch massive strikes over the coming winter against power substations, water supply facilities, sewage systems, and pumping stations in Ukraine, as well as the three nuclear power plants that remain under Kyiv’s control. If successfully implemented, the plan could become the most devastating blow to Ukraine’s energy sector in nearly five years of full-scale war, the publication wrote.
Schemes (Radio Svoboda) obtained a copy of this “Russian plan” from sources in Ukraine’s Defense Forces. The document contains an analysis of Ukraine’s energy capacity and calculations of the number of missiles, drones, and bombs Russia would need to cut major cities — the main targets, including Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Odesa — off from electricity, heating, water, and sewage services.
The full list of “priority cities” also includes Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia, Mykolaiv, Kherson, Poltava, Chernihiv, Kryvyi Rih, Cherkasy, Kropyvnytskyi, Lviv, Vinnytsia, and Ivano-Frankivsk.
The Schemes journalists, like The New York Times, apparently obtained only a partial version of the document: some pages are missing from the Russian-language file.
Russian forces began their campaign of strikes against Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in late September 2026, ahead of Ukraine’s heating season.
Analysts at the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) believe that Ukraine’s battlefield gains in 2026 appear to be forcing Russian President Vladimir Putin to reassess his initial theory of victory in Ukraine and shift his focus toward forcing Ukraine to capitulate through a winter strike campaign.
The ISW believes the campaign is intended to make life “unbearable” for Ukrainians so that Ukraine capitulates to Russia’s demands.
