Zelenskiy urges US pressure on Putin after strikes plunge Kyiv into cold
By Anna Pruchnicka and Olena Harmash
January 20 (Reuters) – President Volodymyr Zelenskiy called on the United States to put more pressure on Russia after a recent airstrike on Ukraine halved the capital’s heating and affected substations that the U.N. atomic watchdog said were vital to nuclear security.
Russia has stepped up its winter campaign against Ukraine’s energy system as it continues to advance on the battlefield as Kiev faces the United States. After nearly four years of war, pressure is on to secure peace while there are scant signs that the Kremlin wants to stop the war.
The city’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, said 5,635 apartment buildings were left without heating in Moscow’s second major attack on Kiev this month, as temperatures dropped to minus 15 Celsius (5 Fahrenheit).
Tuesday’s strikes also follow new peace talks held over the weekend between U.S. and Ukrainian officials as part of a U.S.-backed diplomatic initiative, which Russia was less than keen on.
Zelenskiy said that the United States does not yet have the power to stop Russia and that the Trump administration can increase the pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin if it wishes.
“Can America do more? It can and we really want that and we believe Americans are capable of doing it,” he told reporters in a WhatsApp media chat.
Zelenskiy, previously writing on X, said some of the Russian missiles fired on Tuesday were produced this year and called for tougher sanctions to restrict Moscow’s military production.
He said he was ready to go to Davos, where world leaders gather for the annual economic forum, if Washington was ready to sign documents on security guarantees and a post-war welfare plan for Ukraine.
NEW RUSSIAN ATTACK HIT BLOCKED POWER GRID
Ukraine said Russia launched more than 330 drones and nearly three dozen missiles overnight, most of which were shot down. Russia said it attacked military-industrial, energy and transportation targets in support of the military.
The International Atomic Energy Agency said that “several substations critical to nuclear safety were affected by the attack, and power lines to some other nuclear power plants were also affected.” Ukraine gets more than half of its electricity from nuclear energy.
The agency added that Ukraine’s Chernobyl power plant, where the world’s worst civilian nuclear disaster occurred, also lost all off-site power on Tuesday morning.
Kiev suffered severe power and heating outages due to repeated Russian attacks; Repair crews have been working around the clock for more than a week to repair the items.
The outages forced residents to adapt to falling temperatures, huddled inside their homes and finding other ways to stay warm, such as heating bricks or pitching tents indoors.
Klitschko said heating resumed in most high-rise buildings that lost heat on Tuesday only after previous strikes on January 9.
Energy provider DTEK said more than 335,000 residents lost power, with about half of them restored by late morning when temperatures hovered around minus 10 Celsius.
Klitschko said one person was injured, debris damaged a school building and water supplies were cut off on the left bank of the city, where more than 3 million people live.
One person died and two gas stations were damaged outside the capital, regional officials said. Vinnytsia, Dnipro, Odesa, Zaporizhzhia, Poltava, Sumy and Rivne regions were also attacked, officials said.
Speaking in Davos on Tuesday, Economy Minister Oleksiy Sobolev said that Russia has damaged approximately 8.5 gigawatts of electricity generation capacity since the end of October.
In comments to reporters, Zelenskiy said it cost Ukraine about 80 million euros ($94 million) to repel Tuesday’s attacks and called on Kiev’s partners to increase air defense supplies.
($1 = 0.8516 euros)
(Reporting by Anna Pruchnicka in Gdansk and Olena Harmash and Yuliia Dysa in Kiev; Writing by Dan Peleschuk; Editing by Daniel Flynn and Ros Russell)
