“The situation is the worst in Kyiv: people and companies are facing prolonged power and water outages,” President Zelensky said today after briefings on nine regions—Kiev, Dnipro, Kharkiv, Poltava, Cherkasy, Vinnytsia, Odesa, Zhytomyr and Sumy—announcing generators and cable from Germany and Spain, bonus pay for repair crews, and army units assigned to grid repair. The capital’s thermal plants are gone: Mayor Klitschko counts nearly 50 strikes this year on two of them, and energy analysts told Strana.ua on Nov. 2 that all of Kiev’s cogeneration plants, Trypilska included, are “effectively destroyed,” leaving the city dependent on distant nuclear plants through a handful of substations that are now the targets. Nuclear units provide a relatively constant flow of power and cannot follow demand peaks, so the metro stopped twice in a month when load spiked. On Nov. 3, Poltava and Sumy oblasts went onto “special” emergency shutdowns, which cut critical infrastructure and consumers on imported European power. Forecasts are for outages of three to five days once temperatures reach minus five.

Zelensky has spent most of the past ten days abroad—London, The Hague, Ankara, Berlin on Nov. 3, Madrid this week—ahead of the next round of U.S.-Russia-Ukraine talks, expected in Abu Dhabi.