Widespread power cuts hit Ukraine and spill into Moldova after transmission-line failures
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Summary
Emergency rolling blackouts interrupted metro service in Kyiv and Kharkiv, stopped water service in parts of Kyiv and Vinnytsia, and left traffic systems in Chișinău dark after a simultaneous failure of high-voltage transmission lines; Ukrainian authorities gave differing estimates for full stabilization.
Emergency power cuts hit large parts of Ukraine and neighboring Moldova this morning after a technical failure on major high-voltage transmission lines, the Russian-language bulletin Настоящее время reported.
The program said the blackout prompted emergency rolling outages across most Ukrainian regions, halted metro service in Kyiv and Kharkiv and interrupted water supply in Kyiv and Vinnytsia. In Chișinău, the Moldovan capital, traffic lights and trolleybuses stopped, the bulletin said.
An unidentified reporter on the program said that at 10:42 a simultaneous failure occurred on a 400 kV line between Romania and Moldova and on a 750 kV line between western and central Ukraine. The segment-by-segment failure triggered cascade outages and activated automatic protections at substations; units at Ukraine’s nuclear power plants were reported temporarily unloaded, according to the bulletin.
The Ukrainian energy minister, Denis Shmyhal, was cited by the broadcast as saying the large-scale outage was linked to technological problems on lines between the Ukrainian and Moldovan systems. A member of the Verkhovna Rada energy and housing committee, Sergey Nagornyak, was quoted as saying full stabilization and restoration of complete nuclear generation could take 24–36 hours; the bulletin also cited Ukrenergo as saying power should be restored within two to three hours.
The report placed the outage in a broader security context, noting repeated Russian strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure since the start of the full-scale invasion and saying strikes intensified in January. President Volodymyr Zelensky was quoted as saying that since the night of Jan. 30 Russian forces had not struck Ukrainian energy facilities except for one attack on gas infrastructure in Donetsk oblast; the broadcast also relayed claims that Moscow had shifted targeting toward logistics nodes.
Ukrenergo engineers were described as working to restore service; the bulletin gave no firm timetable for when all customers would be back on supply and presented both the shorter Ukrenergo estimate and the longer parliamentary estimate.
What happens next: the bulletin said restoration efforts were under way and that officials would continue to provide updates; it did not report any formal emergency declaration or new legal measures in the segments presented.