Crimea loses quarter of power after Ukraine halts supplies
MOSCOW/KYIV Dec 31 Crimea has lost at least one
quarter of its power after Ukraine switched off supplies, citing
a downed electricity pylon, an official in the contested
peninsula said on Thursday.
Crimea, which Russia seized from Ukraine in March last year,
has suffered repeated power cuts since the annexation,
underlining its reliance on Ukraine for electricity and fuelling
a downwards spiral in relations between Moscow and Kyiv.
A spokesman for Ukrainian electricity company Ukrenergo
said its staff and police were investigating the incident at the
pylon, which came down in unexplained circumstances, leading to
it halting supplies to Crimea late on Wednesday.
The cut-off coincides with the expiry of a power supply
contract between the company and Crimea. It is unclear when and
if a new contract will be signed.
Crimea, which before the annexation relied on Ukraine for at
least 70 percent of its electricity, suffered a severe blackout
at the end of November after unidentified saboteurs blew up
pylons supplying it with power in southern Ukraine.
Russia then boosted its own supplies to the region and flew
in emergency generators, while power from Ukraine was partially
restored only after just over two weeks.
Crimea’s fuel and power minister Svetlana Borodulina said
the peninsula had lost at least one quarter of its power because
of the latest cut-off.
The region, home to 2 million people, was now running on
just 700 megawatts of electricity per day compared with between
950 and 1,000 megawatts per day before the outage, Russia’s
Interfax news agency quoted her as saying.
Another local official had previously said lines carried by
the downed pylon had been supplying Crimea with around 250
megawatts a day. After the previous outage,
Russia boosted supplies to the region to 400 megawatts per day.
Officials and local residents said the problems caused by
the incident were so far relatively minor.
However, Borodulina advised Crimean residents to economise
on electricity and take precautions such as charging phones and
preparing meals for New Year celebrations early, as intermittent
power cuts were expected, RIA news agency reported.
A Reuters reporter in Sevastopol, Crimea’s largest city,
said problems appeared to be fairly minor compared with those
experienced a month ago, saying that most electrical devices
were still working.
(Reporting by Jason Bush in MOSCOW and Pavel Polityuk in KYIV;
Editing by Andrew Osborn and David Stamp)