Russian strikes knock out power for 600,000 in Ukraine's Dnipropetrovsk region

More than 600,000 people across Ukraine's Dnipropetrovsk region woke up without power Sunday after Russian forces hit key energy facilities overnight, according to the Ukrainian power company DTEK. The utility said the damage was concentrated in what it called important energy facilities of the region, and that the outages hit Pavlohrad, Samariv, Kamian, Dniprovsky districts and the city of Dnipro.

DTEK crews are already on the job, but it isn't a clean repair. The company said repeated attacks are slowing the work and that its priority is getting critical infrastructure back online first. The message went out over Telegram as the region counted the cost of a single night.

The assault came in waves from multiple directions. Ukraine's Air Force reported Russia fired three Kh-59/69 guided aircraft missiles from the Sea of Azov and sent 164 drones from the Orel, Kursk, Millerovo and Primorsko-Akhtarsk regions, plus occupied Donetsk and Crimea's Gvardiyske area. Ukrainian air defense shot down or suppressed 137 of the drones using aircraft, missile troops, electronic warfare and drone units.

Moscow tells a mirror-image story. The Russian Defense Ministry said its forces intercepted and destroyed 142 Ukrainian fixed-wing drones overnight over Belgorod, Bryansk, Kursk, Kaluga, Tula, Oryol, Voronezh, Rostov and Moscow regions, as well as Crimea and the Sea of Azov. It also claimed a strike on a 330-kilovolt substation near Beloshitsy in Ukraine's northern Zhytomyr region.

The night was loud well beyond Dnipropetrovsk. Suspilne reported an explosion in Lutsk in the northwest and blasts in the Vinnytsia region, while an earlier Russian strike on the port city of Odesa killed one person and damaged infrastructure, according to the city's military administration. Air raid alerts sounded across Vinnytsia and Chernihiv regions.

What happens next hinges on how fast DTEK can bring the grid back — and whether the strikes keep coming. With both sides trading drone barrages and targeting energy sites, Ukraine's power system is taking hits that are harder to patch with every round.