Ukraine's Grid Cracks Under Missile Barrage as Kyiv Families Sit 20 Hours in the Dark

One of Ukraine's largest power stations is completely off line after a ballistic missile strike that workers call the most severe of Russia's campaign against the energy grid. Since August, attacks on power facilities have come almost daily, killing several people every week. Kyiv has been hit hardest, its metro trains and trolleybuses at times halted, while hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians nationwide have gone without power in recent weeks.

The rolling blackouts arrived in October, earlier than last winter's, and they're lasting longer. Single mother Daryna Kulchytska, on the seventh floor of a Kyiv flat with her two children, says recent days gave her just four or five hours of electricity, and never on a fixed timetable: two hours on, then eight off. When the power clicked off just before 7:30pm, the lift stopped and the taps ran dry because pumps need electricity, so torches and LED candles came out for a game of Uno. Her 12-year-old son Kyryll put it bluntly: all the fun got sucked out with the electricity.

Officials fear millions of Ukrainians cannot sustain life if power isn't maintained for at least four hours a day, and some privately warn that line is close to being crossed already, with some Kyiv families facing outages of up to 20 hours. President Volodymyr Zelensky says Ukraine still has enough generating capacity to meet demand, but getting that power to homes and businesses is the problem after so many lines and substations were struck. Russia is also deploying what are described as waiter drones that cling to pylons and cables, undetected until Moscow chooses to detonate them.

Inside the shattered plant, the BBC found turbines buried in rubble, twisted metal and broken pipes. Volodymyr Kovalenko, who followed his parents into the industry and has worked there 25 years, was in the control room when missiles hit at 3am, and says the damage is heartbreaking but repairable. Air raid alerts sounded every 15 to 30 minutes, seven times during a four-hour visit, forcing crews to abandon work and shelter in the foundations of the site's chimneys; one Banderol cruise missile was intercepted 5km away. Vadym Bobyr, 39, who leads the recovery, says it hurts to rebuild what they had already fixed once, but they keep working.

DTEK chief executive Maxim Timchenko says Russia has doubled the power and scale of its attacks and is squeezing a degraded grid harder than last winter, with overstretched air defences unable to shield all critical infrastructure. He reckons rebuilding the damaged station will take until at least next summer, because sustained strikes leave workers only one or two productive hours a day. The plant won't be feeding the national grid before this winter ends, and Timchenko frames the effort plainly as a fight for the survival of the country and its people.