Ukraine's Energy Ministry says 1,025 settlements were without electricity on January 9 as the war-wracked country grapples with a wave of unusually cold weather, snowfall, and high winds that even forced Russia to pause its relentless waves of drone and missile strikes.
The ministry said that blizzards and the icing of power lines had led to outages in the Dnipropetrovsk, Odesa, Mykolayiv, and Kirovohrad regions.
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Nearly 29,000 consumers in 324 settlements have been left without electricity in the Dnipropetrovsk region, 268 settlements in the Odesa region, 215 in the Mykolayiv region, and 146 settlements in the Kirovohrad region.
In the Zaporizhzhya region, 59 settlements were cut off, in Kherson 14, and nine in the Chernihiv and Chernivtsiy regions.
"Emergency teams in the regions affected by bad weather are working around the clock to repair the damage," the ministry said in a statement. "However, ice makes work and movement more difficult."
The forecast by Ukraine's hydrometeorological center remains bleak, with more snowfall expected in the south and southeast, and with temperatures as low as minus 21 Celsius at night and minus 12 during the day.
For the first time in weeks, Russia did not launch drone strikes on Ukraine's territory on January 9, a development that Natalia Humenyuk, the spokeswoman of the Defense Forces of Southern Ukraine, said was also due to the spell of unusually bad weather.
"We understand that the absence of a wave of drone attacks is a response, in a certain way, to weather conditions as well. However, the enemy continued the artillery bombardment," Humenyuk said, adding that the southern cities of Kherson and Antonivka bore the brunt of the shelling.
The lull in Russian air strikes comes a day after an unusually heavy wave of missile and drone attacks that left five people dead and wounded dozens in several Ukrainian regions on January 8.
Meanwhile, Vyacheslav Gladkov, the governor of Russia's Belgorod region bordering Ukraine, said that three people were wounded in the city of Belgorod by Ukrainian shelling. Gladkov said on his Telegram channel that Russian air defenses shot down 10 "air targets" late on January 8.
There was no immediate confirmation from Ukraine, but the Kremlin said the Russian military would do everything in its power to tackle the stepped-up Ukrainian shelling of Belgorod.
"Of course, our military will continue to do everything in order to minimize the danger at first and then eliminate it entirely," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
He accused the Ukrainian military of firing on civilian targets in the center of the urban hub of some 340,000 people with weapons supplied by European countries.
The Kremlin has tried to maintain a semblance of normalcy on the home front, but the recent strikes on Belgorod have brought the Ukraine conflict closer to home for Russians.
In recent weeks, the Belgorod region has been repeatedly targeted by Ukrainian forces. A strike late last month reportedly killed 25 civilians, prompting city officials to evacuate hundreds and extend a closure of schools.