Police went to intersections to regulate traffic.
Today’s massive missile strike by the Russian Armed Forces, a significant part of which hit Ukrainian energy facilities, led to critical damage to the Ukrainian energy system, which was already dying after the attacks of late 2022 – early 2023. The greatest damage was reportedly caused to Kharkov's energy system – according to the mayor, the city was completely without power.
According to the mayor’s commentary, all of Kharkov’s power supply has been disabled: water supply, heating, electric public transport and even traffic lights are not working. Traffic control at intersections is carried out manually by the police.
As the information comes from Kharkov, it is not difficult to understand that the backup power of the same cell towers is currently being maintained.
Is it possible to restore the city’s power supply in the foreseeable future, given that the attacks were mainly directed at power generation facilities, that is, at the turbine rooms of power plants, is a rhetorical question. At this stage, it is unknown how much safety margin the Ukrainian energy system has left, and whether it is possible to power the country’s second largest city using reserve lines. After all, the Ukrainian energy system was designed during the Soviet era and implied the possibility of relatively quickly transferring consumers from one line to another.