Largest power plant in Ukraine’s Kyiv region destroyed in Russian attack

Hind Al Soulia - Riyadh - KYIV — The largest power-generating plant in Ukraine’s Kyiv region was reportedly destroyed in a Russian missile attack on Thursday as Moscow steps up its attacks on infrastructure.

Russian shelling caused a large-scale fire at the Trypilska Thermal Power Plant (TPP), with the company still working to localize the fire in the plant’s turbine workshop, energy company Centrenergo said in a statement.

There were no casualties, and the attack has not resulted in power cuts in Ukraine’s capital region Kyiv or other regions supplied by Trypilska TPP.

The plant was the largest supplier of electricity to the regions of Kyiv, Cherkasy and Zhytomyr, the Centrenergo statement said.

The energy company has lost 100% of its power generation across its three plants, which have all been destroyed or occupied by Russia, marking “a black day in the history of Centrenergo,” the statement added.

Over more than two years of war, Russia has systematically targeted Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in an attempt to break the country’s power grid and, with it, the Ukrainian people’s spirit, by depriving them of electricity, heat, water and other essential services in the often-freezing winter temperatures.

The biggest loss of power in Ukraine came shortly after the invasion, when Russian forces seized control of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant – the largest in Europe – which previously accounted for about 20% of the country’s power generation. Ukrainian staff have since put the plant’s reactors into a “cold shutdown” status to prevent a major radioactive incident.

The attack on the Trypilska plant follows a recent Russian attack that destroyed the company’s plant in the Kharkiv region, Zmiivska TPP, on March 22, according to the Centrenergo statement. Russian troops occupied the company’s third plant, Vuhlehirska TPP, in the Donetsk region in July 2022. The total designed capacity of the three power plants was 7690 MW, according to the company’s website.

“As a result of today’s massive attack, our entire generation capacity was destroyed,” the statement added.

Videos published on social media showed vast plumes of smoke billowing from Trypilska TPP as a fire continued to rage.

“The scale of the destruction is terrible. Money can’t estimate it. This is the biggest challenge for us in the history of the company. But I am convinced that we will cope with it,” the Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Centrenergo, Andriy Gota, said. — CNN