Electric blackouts hit Ukraine and Moldova while acute winter prevails

Emergency power cuts swept across several Ukrainian cities as well as neighboring Moldova on Saturday, officials said, amid a commitment from the Kremlin to US President Donald Trump to pause strikes on Kyiv as Ukraine battles one of its bleakest winters in years, reports CNN. 

Ukraine's Energy Minister Denys Shmyhal said that the outages had been caused by a technical malfunction affecting power lines linking Ukraine and Moldova. 

The failure "caused a cascading outage in Ukraine's power grid," triggering automatic protection systems, he said. 

Blackouts were reported in Kyiv, as well as Zhytomyr and Kharkiv regions, in the center and northeast of the country respectively. The outage cut water supplies to the Ukrainian capital, officials said, while the city's subway system was temporarily suspended because of low voltage on the network.

Moldova also experienced major power outages, including in the capital Chisinau, officials said. 

"Due to the loss of power lines on the territory of Ukraine, the automatic protection system was triggered, which disconnected the electricity supply," Moldova's Energy Minister Dorin Junghietu said in a post on Facebook. "I encourage the population to stay calm until electricity is restored." 

The large-scale outage followed weeks of Russian strikes against Ukraine's already struggling energy grid, which have triggered long stretches of severe power shortages.

Moscow has sought to deny Ukrainian civilians heat, light and running water over the course of the war, in a strategy that Ukrainian officials describe as "weaponizing winter."

While Russia has used similar tactics throughout the course of its almost four-year invasion of Ukraine, temperatures throughout this winter have fallen further than usual, bringing widespread hardship to civilians. 

Forecasters say Ukraine will experience a brutally cold period stretching into next week. Temperatures in some areas will drop to minus 30 degrees Celsius (minus 22 Fahrenheit), Ukraine's State Emergency Service said.

Donald Trump said late Thursday that Russian President Vladimir Putin had agreed to a temporary pause in targeting Kyiv and other Ukrainian towns amid the extreme weather.

>>Agency