Ukrainian strikes cut power to Russian-held areas, officials say
June 3 (Reuters) - Ukrainian shelling and drone attacks triggered power cuts over swathes of Russian-controlled territory in Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions in the south of Ukraine, Russia-installed officials said early on Tuesday.
Officials said there was no effect on operations at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station - Europe's largest nuclear facility which was seized by Russia in the weeks after Moscow's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Russian officials running the plant said radiation levels were normal at the facility, which operates in shutdown mode and produces no power at the moment.
Russia-installed governors in the two regions said the Ukrainian attacks prompted authorities to introduce emergency measures and switch key sites to reserve power sources.
Power was knocked out to all parts of Zaporizhzhia under Russian control, Russia-installed Governor Yevgeny Belitsky wrote on Telegram.
"As a result of shelling by the Ukrainian Armed Forces, high-voltage equipment was damaged in the northwestern part of the Zaporizhzhia region," Belitsky wrote.
"There is no electricity throughout the region. The Energy Ministry of Zaporizhzhia region has been instructed to develop reserve sources of power. Health care sites have been transferred to reserve power sources."
In adjacent Kherson region, farther west, Russia-appointed Governor Vladimir Saldo said debris from fallen drones had damaged two substations, knocking out power to more than 100,000 residents of 150 towns and villages in Russian-held areas. Emergency crews working to restore power quickly, he said.
For many long months in the winter, it was Ukrainian towns and villages that endured repeated electricity cuts as Russian attacks focused strikes on generating capacity.
Each side has repeatedly accused the other of launching attacks on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant and running the risk of a nuclear accident.
The U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, said last week in response to a Ukrainian complaint that it saw no sign that Russia was preparing to restart the Zaporizhzhia plant and connect it to the Russian grid.
The IAEA has stationed monitors permanently at Zaporizhzhia and Ukraine's other nuclear power stations.
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The Independent
29 minutes ago
- The Independent
Steve Bannon keeps calling for Lindsey Graham to be ‘thrown in jail' for ‘stirring it up' in Ukraine
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Daily Mail
an hour ago
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The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Germany on tenterhooks for Merz's first official meeting with Trump
Germany's new conservative leader, Friedrich Merz, is due in Washington on Thursday for his first official meeting with Donald Trump, putting political Berlin on tenterhooks like no other transatlantic encounter in living memory. Discussions between the German chancellor and the US president will focus on Ukraine, the Middle East and trade policies. How well or badly the talks go – during a small group meeting, followed by a lunch and then, perhaps most nailbitingly, a press conference in the Oval Office – may shape relations for decades to come, analysts say. Long before his plane was due to take off on Wednesday evening, political observers in Berlin were weighing up the most nuanced of indicators as to how the visit might play out. The fact that Merz is being put up in Blair House, the official government guesthouse – a factor that persuaded his advisers he should stay the night, when he otherwise might have just slept on the plane – is being seen as a positive sign. 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He told an audience in Berlin that during a half-hour phone conversation the two spoke, among other things, about places and people in the US with which they were mutually acquainted, Merz from his time when he took a break from politics and worked there as a commercial lawyer. 'Every second or third word was 'great',' Merz recalled with a smirk. He made sure to congratulate Trump on the election of the new North American pope. Several people on both sides have stressed the 'positive tone', the importance of which Lau said was not to be underestimated, 'because the tone is the politics'. But nobody in Berlin is resting on their laurels. As to just how quickly leaders' inaugural visits to the Oval Office can curdle, one only needs to recall Volodymyr Zelenskyy's lions' den encounter three months' ago, or more recently the South African president Cyril Ramaphosa's. It has not gone unnoticed that Merz called the latter last Friday, reportedly to pick up a few Trump-whisperer tips. Normally, a visit such as this would not get so much attention in Berlin, according to Henrike Rossbach, a parliamentary correspondent for the Süddeutsche Zeitung. 'But the chancellery has long since recognised that the most reliable thing about Trump is his unpredictability … and the Oval Office has been labelled as an item on the agenda containing residual risk.' The type of reception Merz gets could come down to the mood Trump happens to be in that day. Not something a typical German mind, keen on structure and order, usually finds easy to deal with. But Merz is said to have been coached on an array of eventualities and is armed, rhetorically at least. If pushed by Trump on longstanding issues of bilateral disgruntlement such as Germany's underspending on the military, Merz will lay out his new government's plans to increase contributions to 3.5% of GDP in future, as well as investing a further 1.5% in 'defence relevant infrastructure'. Sign up to Headlines Europe A digest of the morning's main headlines from the Europe edition emailed direct to you every week day after newsletter promotion 'Though, keeping it short for Trump, he may just round it up to 5%,' said Frankfurter Allgemeine's political correspondent Matthias Wyssuwa. Getting the grounding right on this will be seen as crucial by Germany's allies before the G7 summit in Canada in mid-June and, a week later, the Nato summit in The Hague, both of which Trump is expected to attend. Merz will also stress his government's tightened immigration policy, recalling how Trump criticised Angela Merkel on this topic during his first term of office in 2017. When it comes to tariffs, in particular a punishing 50% on aluminium and steel introduced the day before his arrival, Merz has already prepped – and used – the firm sentence that the US should remember it is dealing with a marketplace of 500 million consumers when it does business with the EU's 27 members. Merz knows that keeping things brief, not interrupting, heaping praise and stressing the commonalities is the accepted playbook when dealing with Trump. The subject of Trump's German roots might also help. It was apparently the US president who brought it up when they spoke – even though until well into the 1980s Trump had been apparently keen to hide the fact. Trump's grandfather Friedrich changed his name to Frederick upon emigrating to the US in 1869. Merz has already discussed with Trump the idea of bringing him on a heritage tour of his old heimat, Kallstadt, a village in the rural wine region of south-west Germany famous for its grape juice and speciality pig's stomach (there has been speculation this might be what he ends up gifting the teetotal president). However, it would require treading carefully with the locals who, anecdotally at least, seem far from enthusiastic about hosting him, far less erecting a statue of their most famous son as some have suggested. Usefully, Merz knows the region, having completed his military service there in the 1970s. One subject he may choose to avoid, though, is the fact that Trump's grandfather was in effect kicked out, deported as punishment for having skipped the mandatory military service of the day.
