"All necessary response measures at the level of Ukraine's energy system are in place, and restoration work is ongoing. The task now is to stabilize the situation as soon as possible," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy wrote on US social media company X, after receiving reports from Shmyhal and Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko on the situation.

The Ukrainian Energy Ministry said in an earlier statement that emergency power outages have been applied in multiple regions, including Kyiv and Kharkiv, on the instructions of the country's power grid operator, Ukrenergo, which announced separately that emergency shutdowns are in effect in the Cherkasy, Chernihiv, and Zhytomyr regions as well.

"According to experts' forecasts, power supply will be restored within the next two to three hours," the ministry further said. It later stated the country's power system is gradually recovering and that efforts are underway to restore power, with the primary task being restoring supplies to critical infrastructure.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian private energy provider DTEK also declared the implementation of emergency power outages in the Odesa and Dnipropetrovsk regions on Ukrenergo's instructions.

Ukraine's blackouts were avoidable. Energoatom corruption and political vendetta made them inevitable | EuroMaidan Press - 14 Nov. 2025 |

⚡ Ukraine and Moldova report mass power outages amid `technological disruption'

📍 Ukraine's energy minister says a 750 kV line linking western and central regions and a 400 kV line connecting Romania and Moldova were shut down [_link] pic.twitter.com/hDDQqkf7Gy

— Anadolu English (@anadoluagency) January 31, 2026

"Europe has problems, as we all do. But when MAGA types declare that a prosperous continent that in many ways delivers a better life for its citizens than we do is a social and economic hellscape, that says more about them than it does about Europe."

Via MofA ...

Water Is A Luxury: Complete Water Cut In Kyiv Exposes Fragility of Critical Infrastructure

On the morning of January 31, the city of Kyiv, with its millions of residents, fell into a silence broken only by the howling wind. Not only had the metro and trams stopped, but for the first time since the war began, the pumps supplying the city with water had ceased operating completely. The total shutdown of the water supply in all districts of the Ukrainian capital marked the darkest period of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict thus far, exposing the fragility of the metropolis's life support systems when critical infrastructure is attacked.

Trump 0, Europe 1 | Paul Krugman substack |

Ignorance and contempt lose a round

As I wrote yesterday, Donald Trump and his team clearly went to Davos determined to demean and insult their hosts. It was, one might say, a novel approach to diplomacy: "You're pathetic, your societies and economies are falling apart, now give us Greenland."

And it worked about as well as you'd expect. Trump may have imagined that the Europeans would cower in the face of his wrath. Instead, they humiliated him. He dropped his latest tariff threats in return for a "framework" that gave the United States essentially nothing it didn't already have -- and left behind a Europe that is finally united in resistance to his bullying.

The Trump team went to Europe in a state of malign ignorance, exemplified by Trump saying during his Davos harangue that "without us, you'd all be speaking German." Most Swiss speak ... German.
Trumpian contempt for Europe rests on two beliefs we already knew were false, and a third belief the Europeans proved false this week.

First, Trump and company are wedded to the belief that non-white, non-Christian immigrants have destroyed European society, that Europe's cities are hellscapes of rampant crime and social disorder -- the trans-Atlantic version of what they believe about New York. In reality, while Europe has had some problems assimilating immigrants, the continent remains incredibly safe by U.S. standards.