The city of Kherson in southern Ukraine, which remains under Russian military control despite the advance of Ukrainian forces, was without power and water today, and the Kakovka dam in the same area was badly damaged after two strikes that Russians and Ukrainians blame each other for.

The head of the Moscow-appointed Kherson regional administration, Vladimir Saldo, assured the Russian television Rossiya-24 that “the electricians have already left for repair work, the restoration of power supply is expected today.”

“As a result of a terrorist attack organized by the Ukrainian side, three concrete poles with high-voltage power lines were damaged in the Berislav-Kakovka direction,” the occupation administration said earlier in Telegram. “Currently, the city (Kherson) and some districts of the region” annexed by Moscow at the end of September have neither electricity nor water.

The head of the Ukrainian military command of the Kherson region, Yaroslav Yanusevich, said that “the Russian army blew up high-voltage power lines” 1.5 km long in Berislav. “The occupying forces also destroyed high-voltage lines leading to the city of Kherson,” which, according to the same source, caused “supply problems” for the city and other municipalities.

This is the first known major power and water outage in Kherson that has been in the hands of the Russian military since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

According to a representative of the emergency services of the Kherson region, quoted by Russian news agencies, “more than 10 settlements in the region (currently) are without power.”

Kherson, a major Ukrainian city that has been under occupation by the Russian army since February, has been turned into a “fortress” by Russian forces against Ukrainian forces that have been approaching for weeks.

Since the beginning of the conflict, Ukrainian soldiers have very rarely attacked the civilian energy infrastructure captured by the Russians in the annexed territories, mainly along the supply lines of the Russian military.

Russia, for its part, has destroyed nearly 40 percent of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in recent weeks, causing massive power and water outages in many places, including the capital Kyiv.

Source: APE-MPE, AFP.