Russia just cut power to a whole Ukrainian region and hospitals are on generators
15 hours ago · 8 November 2026Share
Downed power line towers after a tornado near Browns Ferry Nuclear Power Plant, Alabama. File photo. Samt2565393 · CC BY-SA 3.0
Russia just knocked the power out for more than 600,000 people in eastern Ukraine.
One overnight strike. One region. Dnipropetrovsk.
The attack hit energy sites a few hours ago. DTEK, the company that runs most of the region's grid, confirmed it on Telegram. It said important energy facilities had been damaged.
Five districts went dark. Dniprovskyi, Kamianskyi, Samarivskyi, Pavlohrad and Synelnykivskyi. Plus parts of Dnipro city itself.
Hospitals are now running on generators. So is other critical infrastructure.
Oleksandr Hanzha runs the Dnipropetrovsk Regional Military Administration. He's telling everyone who still has power to use less of it. He says grid stability now depends on that.
So think about what that actually means. A regional official is telling the public their own usage could decide whether their neighbours' lights stay on.
DTEK says its workers are already out trying to fix it. But here's the problem. Russia keeps attacking while they work. The company says it's prioritising critical infrastructure first.
And this isn't a one-off.
Russia has been hitting this region's power grid since 29 October. Ten days of it.
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U.S. Army air defenders with a Patriot missile launcher in Poland on November 22, 2022, a system that protects NATO infrastructure from aircraft and missiles. File photo.U.S. Army 10AAMDC by Maj. Robert Fellingham · Public domain
On 30 October, emergency power cuts hit Dnipro and the wider region. Almost every electric bus and tram in the city stopped running.
Then, just the evening before this attack, on 7 November, Hanzha said more than 60,000 consumers in Dnipro alone had already lost power. That was a smaller outage, in Dnipro city only, the night before this one. Not the 600,000-consumer outage across the wider region that followed it.
DTEK has done this before too. On 2 November, it restored power to 820,000 households in Dnipropetrovsk region after a weekend of attacks damaged seven of its facilities. One of them got hit twice.
So add it up. This is the region's third major power crisis in ten days.
And it's part of something much bigger. Through October, DTEK restored power to more than 6.7 million households across Kyiv, Kyiv region, Odesa, Dnipropetrovsk and Donetsk after Russian shelling. That includes 1.42 million households in Dnipropetrovsk region alone.
Ukraine's air defence says it shot down 137 drones in the same overnight barrage on 8 November. A separate drone strike hit a residential area overnight too. One person was hurt. Homes and apartment buildings were damaged.
Russia has not said anything. No claim of responsibility. No statement on what it was targeting.
We also don't know a few things. How many facilities were actually damaged this time. When the power comes back. Whether the hospitals now running on generators are short on fuel or capacity.
This is the third time in ten days that DTEK has had to fight to keep this region's grid alive. Each time, the company gets the lights back on. Each time, Russia hits it again.
Right now, more than 600,000 people in eastern Ukraine are sitting in the dark. And the company trying to fix their power says Russian attacks keep getting in the way.
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