Russians Strike Ukraine Power Infrastructure But Ukraine Hits Back and Parts of Russia Have No Electric No Heat
Murmansk, Russia, in 2023. The city has been plagued by power and heating outages this winter. Credit...Nanna Heitmann for The New York Times By Nataliya Vasilyeva New York Times Adamfoxie Blog Older women going to bed in their winter coats. Unlit streetlamps hanging over pitch-black city streets. Emergency services setting up heated tents with drinks and snacks. Such scenes are typical in Ukraine as Russia bombards power and heat networks. Now they are being replicated across Russia, but the culprit is the country’s deteriorating public utilities, not enemy fire. Since December, a dozen major blackouts and central heating cutoffs across Russia, from the Murmansk region in the European Arctic to the Pacific Coast, have left hundreds of thousands of Russians with no electricity or heat for days during an unusually brutal winter. Russia’s utilities suffer from chronic underfunding, made worse by resources being diverted to the war, and breakdowns have become more commo...
