Russia attacked five major power substations overnight, hours before Ukraine Russia talks open in Abu Dhabi, in a strike Kyiv says is designed to pressure its negotiators. Prime Minister Serhii Koretskyi said five major energy substations in Poltava, Dnipropetrovsk, Vinnytsia and Kirovohrad regions were hit, substations through which electricity is transmitted between regions, and that Russia attacked 10 regions in all.
Why it matters
The scale of the overnight attack was large. The Ukrainian military said Russia fired 162 drones and one ballistic missile, and the strikes came after a weekend in which Russian attacks on the energy network cut power to hundreds of thousands of people. With winter approaching, the grid is both a military target and a weapon, and every substation lost makes the cold harder to bear. Ukraine energy sector is now the focus of the Nordic talks in Copenhagen, where Denmark has announced a further 150 million kroner for energy infrastructure.
The timing is the message. The strikes landed on the night before the first direct Ukraine Russia talks in more than nine months, and Zelenskyy has said the intensified attacks are part of Moscow strategy of putting pressure on Ukraine position at the negotiations. A delegation that arrives with its power grid burning negotiates from weakness, and Moscow knows it.
What happens next
The human cost runs alongside the infrastructure damage. Kyiv said 55 people were killed in a frontline village as they queued for humanitarian aid, in one of the deadliest single strikes of the war, and the toll underlines what the talks are supposed to stop. The war has killed hundreds of thousands, displaced millions, and dragged on for 56 months without a settlement.
What happens next will be decided in Abu Dhabi, where negotiators meet on Tuesday and Wednesday, and in Copenhagen, where Zelenskyy is pressing Nordic leaders for air defence and energy protection. Denmark has already answered with a new aid package worth about 643 million euros. For Ukraine, the grid must hold until the talks produce something worth the wait, and the winter will test every repair the engineers make.
