Vitali Klitschko, the former heavyweight boxing champion and current Mayor of Kyiv, has urged a partial evacuation of the Ukrainian capital due to power cuts caused by Russian strikes.
“If you have relatives or friends in the suburbs of Kyiv who have a separate water supply, a stove and heating, plan to stay there temporarily,” he said in comments to local media quoted by The Telegraph, as his city and several others already face planned, rolling blackouts in a last-ditch effort to stabilise Ukraine’s degraded energy grid.
With some 450,000 apartments in Kyiv already without power, Klitschko suggested he was counting on people to “make arrangements so that in the event of a bad scenario, you can stay with your friends or acquaintances” who have access to old-fashioned cooking and home heating sources which use wood and other solid fuel, and water supplied by a household or local well rather than the mains.
Homes with traditional fireplaces, wood-burning stoves, and so on are now fewer in number in many countries than they might otherwise have been, particularly in Western Europe, due to the net-zero lobby trying to discourage them for being a source of carbon emissions — although those who can are turning to them in increasing numbers as a winter energy crisis looms. In the UK, buying coal to burn at home is being banned outright, just in time for a winter of gas shortages.
With the Russian military having turned increasingly towards strategic strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure ever since a significant battlefield reverse in the Kharkiv (Kharkov) region and the apparent truck bombing of the Kerch Bridge between the Crimea and Russia proper, Mayor Klitschko warned that a more extensive evacuation may be on the cards in the near future.
“We are doing everything to avoid this. But let’s be frank, our enemies are doing everything for the city to be without heat, without electricity, without water supply, in general, so we all die,” Klitschko asserted, warning that “the future of the country and the future of each of us depends on how prepared we are for different situations.”
“Putin does not need us Ukrainians. He needs the region, he needs a Ukraine without us,” he added.
Across Ukraine, over 4.5 million people are currently without power, according to President Volodymyr Zelensky.
“The terrorist state is concentrating forces and means for a possible repetition of mass attacks on our infrastructure,” he said, in reference to Russia.
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