Russia knocks out Kyiv’s power, heating and water

Russia unleashed another massive barrage of missiles and drones on Kyiv overnight, knocking out power, water and heating to much of the Ukrainian capital and plunging it deeper into crisis amid the harshest winter of the war.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Tuesday that the Russian strikes had “involved a significant number of ballistic and cruise missiles” and “more than 300 attack drones”.

Russia has intensified its aerial attacks on Ukraine and its critical infrastructure over the winter in an effort, Kyiv officials say, to bring the country to its knees as a deep freeze grips the war-weary country.

The barrage came hours after the Kremlin said that US President Donald Trump had invited Vladimir Putin to sit with him on a “Board of Peace” set up to mediate the conflict in Gaza and other geopolitical hotspots, potentially including Ukraine.

Trump sent an invitation to Zelenskyy for him to join the Board of Peace, the Ukrainian president told the FT.

“We have received the invitation to the Peace Council. Diplomats are working on this invitation. To be honest, Russia is our enemy. Belarus is its ally. It is very difficult for me to imagine how we and Russia could be together in any kind of council,” Zelenskyy said in a text message.

Before accepting, Zelenskyy wanted to better understand how the board would operate, two people familiar with the matter said, and whether Trump intended for it to operate independently or take the place of a board currently being discussed by American and Ukrainian negotiators as part of a peace plan to bring Russia’s war to an end. 

A senior Ukrainian official told the FT last week that the current draft of the 20-point US-Ukraine peace plan “provides that its implementation will be monitored and guaranteed by a Board of Peace, chaired by President Trump”.

The official said the plan stated that Ukraine, Europe, Nato, Russia and the US would all be part of a board established particularly for the Russia-Ukraine war. The Trump administration has not clarified whether this is separate, according to the official.

Zelenskyy told the FT he was staying in Ukraine “for now” rather than travelling to the World Economic Forum in Davos. “I am choosing Ukraine rather than an economic forum,” he said. The Ukrainian president had been expected to meet Trump and European leaders in the Swiss resort and to potentially sign documents on the country’s economic prosperity and postwar security that had been negotiated with the US.

Zelenskyy added that he was willing to change his plans if there were signals that the US side was willing to sign the documents, which he described as being “at the final mile”.

“If the documents are ready, we will have a meeting and there will be a trip. If there are energy packages, or even a meeting and a decision on additional air defence, I will certainly travel,” he added.

Kyiv was still reeling from previous attacks when the missiles and drones again struck its critical infrastructure early on Tuesday, knocking out heating to 5,635 multistorey buildings, mayor Vitali Klitschko said. Almost 80 per cent of the buildings were those where heating supply had been restored after an attack on January 9, he added. 

Much of the eastern side of the capital across the Dnipro river was without water supply and power on Tuesday morning, according to Klitschko. Several areas of central Kyiv were also without power, heating and water.

Ukrenergo, the state energy company, said emergency power outages had been introduced in several regions of Ukraine.

Zelenskyy said Russia also attacked the regions of Vinnytsia, Dnipro, Odesa, Zaporizhzhia, Poltava and Sumy.

Public utility companies and state energy and emergency services raced on Tuesday morning to restore heat, water and electricity to residents, as temperatures hovered around minus 14C.

Ukraine’s air defence forces, which have faced painful shortages due to the US slow-rolling munitions, intercepted “a significant number of targets”, Zelenskyy added. But numerous wall-shaking explosions were heard by an FT reporter in central Kyiv in the night.

“The day before this strike, we finally received the necessary missiles, which helped significantly,” Zelenskyy said, adding that more interceptor munitions “are critically needed”.

Oleksiy Sobolev, Ukraine’s economy minister, said that Russian attacks between October and Tuesday had damaged 8.5GW of the generating capacity, including thermal and hydroelectric power plants.

“A lot of this has been restored and then attacked and destroyed again, and it’s all happening again,” he said at the Ukrainian House in Davos on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum.