Geo-politics

Russia Hammers Kyiv’s Power Grid with 36 Ballistic Missiles Days Before Abu Dhabi Peace Talks as Zelenskyy Accuses Moscow of Using Strikes as Leverage

Abdul Mannan 3 minutes ago • 17 min read

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy speaking at an event in New York, September 2026. — Photo: Wikimedia Commons / Xuthoria (CC BY-SA 4.0) — Volodymyr Zelenskyy interviewed by Emma Tucker at Journal House during UNGA / NYCW 2026, 22 September 2026. File photo, not from the November 2026 attacks.

Russia launched one of its heaviest overnight bombardments of Ukraine’s energy system on the night of 6 to 7 November, firing 36 ballistic missiles and 172 drones at Kyiv and twelve other regions, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, just three days before Ukrainian, Russian and American negotiators are due to meet in Abu Dhabi for the first trilateral peace talks in months.

Ukrainian air defences intercepted only four of the 36 ballistic missiles, Mr Zelenskyy said on Saturday, a shortfall he blamed on a shortage of interceptors for the Patriot air-defence systems that guard the capital. The barrage plunged five regions into darkness, damaged the transmission lines that carry electricity from two nuclear power plants to Kyiv and central Ukraine, and forced the closure of one of the capital’s main bridges across the Dnipro River.

The Ukrainian president accused Moscow of deliberately escalating its attacks to gain leverage before the negotiations, which are scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday, 10 and 11 November, in the United Arab Emirates. “By intensifying its attacks on Ukraine and our infrastructure at this very moment, Russia is trying to additionally lay the groundwork for putting pressure on Ukraine’s position and that of its partners,” Mr Zelenskyy said, according to The Guardian’s Ukraine war briefing. “Russia perceives diplomacy in its own peculiar way — as a form of aggression.”

At least nine people were wounded across Ukraine in the overnight attacks, including a child, according to the Associated Press. Homes and commercial buildings were damaged in Kyiv, a kindergarten was partly destroyed, and residents faced new interruptions to electricity, water and heating as temperatures hovered around freezing and the first winter snow fell in parts of the country.

A night aimed at the grid

Ukraine’s energy ministry said on Saturday that a “massive attack on a number of energy facilities” had plunged five regions into darkness and significantly hampered electricity transmission in Kyiv and the surrounding region, according to Agence France-Presse. Consumers in the Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Kyiv, Zhytomyr and Kharkiv regions were left without power, the ministry said.

The damage was concentrated on the arteries of the grid rather than on power generation itself. Mr Zelenskyy said a substation in the Kyiv region that links the Rivne and Khmelnytskyi nuclear power plants to the capital and the central regions had been hit, and that substations in Vinnytsia, Zhytomyr, Rivne, Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk had also been damaged. The energy ministry said the transmission and distribution networks had suffered significant damage, and that the outages were separate from the scheduled rolling blackouts already imposed across much of Ukraine to protect the grid.

Mr Zelenskyy made a point that cuts against the usual blackout story: Ukraine is generating more electricity than it consumes. The shortages, he said, come from strikes on substations and grid links, not from a lack of generation. That distinction matters, because it means the damage is repairable only as fast as engineers can rebuild high-voltage equipment that Russia keeps targeting — and because it explains why the Kremlin has returned, winter after winter, to the same class of targets.

Kyiv’s mayor, Vitali Klitschko, said the capital’s energy situation was “extremely difficult” after the strikes damaged energy facilities and a key bridge. The Northern Bridge, an 816-metre road link connecting the city centre with large residential areas on the eastern bank of the Dnipro, was hit and closed to traffic in both directions while engineers assessed its condition. Mr Zelenskyy said six ballistic missiles had been fired at the bridge and four of them struck it. Russia’s defence ministry confirmed on Saturday that it had targeted the bridge, saying it facilitated the transport of weaponry, military hardware and specialist equipment for Ukraine’s armed forces.

Kyiv’s water supply system was later restored to normal operation, according to the mayor, and around 60 per cent of apartment buildings in the capital were connected to the heating system. But the damage added to a difficult week for residents who had already faced day-long power cuts and interruptions to water supply, and it came as the country braces for another harsh winter in the fifth year of the war.

North Korean missiles, preliminary findings say

Mr Zelenskyy said on Saturday that preliminary findings from investigations at the impact sites showed Russia had used North Korean-made KN-23 ballistic missiles against a key energy facility. “According to preliminary findings, at one of the key energy facilities that was damaged, the Russians used KN-23 missiles manufactured and supplied by North Korea,” he said, according to reports of his remarks.

That assessment is preliminary, not a final forensic report, and Russia has not commented on the claim. But if confirmed, it would add to a body of evidence that North Korean weapons have become a regular feature of Russia’s long-range strikes on Ukraine — and it would raise fresh questions about the enforcement of the international sanctions that are supposed to prevent such transfers.

Russia’s defence ministry said only that its forces had struck military-industrial, energy and transport targets in and around Kyiv. It did not address the North Korean missile claim. Moscow has consistently described its attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure as strikes on military targets, a characterisation Kyiv and its allies reject, pointing to the civilian toll of the blackouts.

A plea for interceptors

The most consequential number in Mr Zelenskyy’s account of the night was not the size of the barrage but the interception rate. Only four of 36 ballistic missiles were shot down, he said — a figure that exposes the limits of Ukraine’s air defences when Russia fires large numbers of fast, hard-to-intercept weapons at the same time.

“Unfortunately, there is still a significant shortage of interceptors for Patriot systems, and the United States is in the best position to help address it,” Mr Zelenskyy said, according to The Guardian’s briefing. He urged Washington to increase its aid to Ukraine, and warned that the world should not look away while Russia tries to black out a city of millions.

“When Russia tries to plunge Kyiv — a city of millions — and the entire country into a blackout, Ukraine must not be left to face this alone,” he said.

The appeal lands at a sensitive moment. American military assistance to Ukraine has flagged in recent months, and the diplomatic track has been stalled since February, when Washington shifted its attention to its war with Iran. The Abu Dhabi talks are the first trilateral meeting in months, and Mr Zelenskyy’s message to his partners is that the negotiating table and the battlefield cannot be treated as separate worlds: what happens to Kyiv’s power grid in the days before the talks shapes what Ukraine can accept at them.

The talks in Abu Dhabi

Hours after a separate Russian attack on a Ukrainian aid centre earlier in the week, the United States’ special envoy, Steve Witkoff, announced that delegations from Ukraine and Russia would meet in Abu Dhabi on 10 and 11 November. In a social media post, Mr Witkoff said the talks would address “post-war security agreements, de-escalation, humanitarian measures, and ending the war”, according to Al Jazeera.

Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to the new round of three-way talks after meeting Mr Witkoff in St Petersburg on 21 October. The Kremlin has confirmed that a Russian delegation will attend, led as before by former culture minister Vladimir Medinsky, according to the state news agency TASS. Jared Kushner, the US president’s son-in-law, is expected to join the American side.

Mr Zelenskyy said this week that he hoped the adviser-level talks in Abu Dhabi would lead to a three-way meeting of leaders that includes Mr Putin. Speaking in Berlin alongside German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, he said the talks were part of a broader diplomatic push to end the war. Mr Merz said it was “important that Russia finally and seriously engages in negotiations about a ceasefire and a subsequent peace agreement”.

Mr Putin and Mr Zelenskyy have had no direct contact since the full-scale invasion began, and their representatives have held only a handful of rounds of talks. European governments have insisted on being involved in the negotiations but are unlikely to be at the table in Abu Dhabi, according to Al Jazeera. Mr Zelenskyy has drawn a bright line on security, saying guarantees for Ukraine must be strong and cannot be dictated by Russia, and that freezing the front lines could be a minimum first step, followed by talks on those guarantees.

The talks also come with a possible wider diplomatic horizon. According to Al Jazeera, President Donald Trump, President Xi Jinping of China and Mr Putin may hold three-way talks on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Shenzhen, China, on 18 and 19 November. That meeting remains only under consideration, not scheduled, and should not be treated as a given.

The Oleshky opening, squandered

The Abu Dhabi talks follow a rare, small success in humanitarian diplomacy — and a reminder of how quickly such openings can close. Last week, a six-day local ceasefire in the Russian-occupied city of Oleshky, in the southern Kherson region, enabled the evacuation of hundreds of residents and the delivery of aid amid bombardment and severe shortages of food. The truce was brokered by US First Lady Melania Trump, and Ukrainian officials said they hoped it could serve as a model for wider de-escalation.

Mr Zelenskyy argued this week that Moscow had squandered that opening. On Monday, Russian forces bombed an aid centre at a school in the village of Komyshuvakha, in the Zaporizhzhia region, killing at least 31 people, according to Ukrainian officials and Al Jazeera. The school had been closed to students because the village sits too close to the front line; instead, it served as a shelter and as a weekly distribution point for aid packages, which residents collected every Monday.

“The Russians struck first just as people were arriving — a few aerial bombs,” Mr Zelenskyy said in his nightly address, according to Al Jazeera. “Then there was a second strike — more air bombs, this time on the shelter. A vile terrorist strike.” Among the dead were two members of a rescue crew and four police officers, according to Ukraine’s emergency services. Five people, including two rescue workers, were being treated in hospitals. There was no immediate comment from Russia.

“If Russia genuinely wanted de-escalation, there was an opportunity following the situation in Oleshky to continue taking humanitarian steps,” Mr Zelenskyy said. “We proposed this. But Russia continues to kill people.” He called the attack “further proof that Russia does not want any kind of de-escalation, any real justice”.

Ukraine’s foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, cited the attack in urging countries to oppose Russia’s return to elite international sport, after the Court of Arbitration for Sport ordered that Russia be reinstated in major ice hockey tournaments. “Russia deserves condemnation, isolation, and consequences, not a return to international respectability,” Mr Sybiha wrote on X.

Elsewhere in Ukraine on Monday, drone strikes injured 12 people in the eastern Kharkiv region, damaging a refrigeration facility, greenhouses and homes, according to emergency services. In the Black Sea port of Odesa, five people were injured when a warehouse was hit and nearby houses were damaged, according to Al Jazeera.

Strikes in both directions

The war did not pause on the Russian side of the border either. A Ukrainian attack killed one person in Russia’s Belgorod region on Saturday, when a drone hit a private home in the town of Grayvoron, local officials said. Russia’s defence ministry said its forces had shot down 411 Ukrainian drones overnight over ten Russian regions, including Belgorod, and that drones had also been destroyed over the annexed Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea and the Black and Azov seas.

Russian media outlets later reported that the Saratov oil refinery had been hit and shared images of plumes of smoke over the city. The pattern of mutual long-range strikes — Russia against Ukraine’s energy grid, Ukraine against Russian refineries and logistics — has become the war’s daily rhythm, and it is the backdrop against which the Abu Dhabi talks will open.

Mr Zelenskyy also said Ukrainian intelligence had warned that Russia was preparing a new “massive attack” on the country’s energy and logistics networks, timed to coincide with the US midterm elections on Tuesday. Writing on X, he said Moscow was counting on the world’s attention being elsewhere, allowing Ukraine’s struggles with air defences and Patriot missiles to go unnoticed. He urged Washington to pressure Russia “in such a way that it has no alternative but to end this war”.

A wider European front

The pressure on Ukraine’s partners is not only military. On Saturday, Italy’s foreign minister, Antonio Tajani, said he had been targeted by pro-Russian hackers over his backing for Ukraine. Mr Tajani said in a post on X that “backing in a transparent way the freedom and independence of a sovereign state” had made him a target, and that his personal data had been published on the dark web, with the hackers seeking further information about him and his family and willing to pay for it.

The Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, one of the strongest backers of Ukraine among Western leaders, expressed her support for Mr Tajani and said the sale of confidential information relating to public officials was “a matter of serious concern”. Moscow has not commented on the incident.

In France, the far-left presidential contender Jean-Luc Mélenchon said on Saturday that settling the Ukraine conflict could not be done by granting territorial concessions without consulting the people concerned. “We cannot accept that one could consider a peace with territorial concessions in Ukraine without asking the populations concerned if they agree or not to be on one side or other of the border,” he told a rally just outside Paris. “It is for the people themselves to decide what they want.” Mr Mélenchon, who polls suggest could reach the second round of next year’s presidential election, said an administration run by his party would take an active role in settling the war, and that Europe would have to play an active role in peace talks.

Analysis: Why It Matters

1. The timing is the message

Russia has struck Ukraine’s energy infrastructure before almost every round of negotiations in this war, and the pattern is now so regular that it has become part of the diplomacy itself. A barrage three days before talks does two things at once: it reminds Kyiv that Moscow can impose a cost on civilians at will, and it tests whether Ukraine’s partners will respond with more aid or with pressure on Kyiv to compromise. Mr Zelenskyy’s decision to name the tactic publicly — “Russia perceives diplomacy in its own peculiar way, as a form of aggression” — is itself a negotiating move. He is trying to make sure the strikes are read in Abu Dhabi as coercion, not as background noise, so that no one at the table can pretend the two sides are arriving on equal terms.

2. The interception rate is the real story

Four of 36 ballistic missiles intercepted is a number that should alarm anyone watching this war. Ballistic missiles are the hardest weapons to shoot down: they arrive fast, from high altitude, and only a handful of systems — Patriot foremost among them — can reliably intercept them. When Ukraine runs short of interceptors, the missiles get through, and the targets they hit are the substations and transmission lines that keep a city of millions warm in winter. The shortage is not a technical accident; it is a political fact about how much Western support has thinned. If the Abu Dhabi talks produce nothing, the question of whether Washington restocks Ukraine’s Patriot batteries will matter more than any communiqué.

3. The grid is the front line now

This war has always had two fronts: the trenches in the east and the power grid everywhere else. The grid front is quieter and less photogenic, but it reaches every Ukrainian household. Russia’s strategy is attritional in the most literal sense: destroy the equipment that moves electricity from where it is generated to where it is used, and let cold, darkness and broken water systems do the rest. Mr Zelenskyy’s observation that Ukraine generates more power than it consumes is a useful corrective to the idea that the country is simply running out of electricity — but it is cold comfort to a family in Kyiv whose building has no heat because the substation down the road was hit. The repair crews are the unsung heroes of this war, and they are working against an adversary that studies their repairs and strikes again.

4. The North Korean thread

If the preliminary finding that North Korean KN-23 missiles were used against a key energy facility is confirmed, it will be one more piece of evidence that the war in Ukraine is no longer a bilateral conflict. North Korean weapons, Iranian drones, Chinese components and Western interceptors are all part of the same battlefield, and the sanctions regimes that were supposed to keep the first three out of Russia’s hands have plainly not worked. The KN-23 claim also matters for the talks: any security arrangement that ignores the supply chains feeding Russia’s missile arsenal will be built on sand. A ceasefire that leaves Moscow free to restock from Pyongyang is a pause, not a peace.

5. Oleshky showed what is possible — and what is not

The six-day ceasefire in Oleshky was small, local and temporary, but it mattered: hundreds of people were evacuated, aid got through, and a channel opened that had not existed before. That it was brokered by the American first lady rather than through the formal diplomatic machinery is itself a comment on how stalled the official track had become. The Komyshuvakha bombing that followed shows the limits of such openings. A local truce does not change Moscow’s strategic calculus, and a humanitarian gesture that is not followed by pressure is easily pocketed and forgotten. The test for Abu Dhabi is whether the negotiators can turn a humanitarian opening into a political one — a durable energy ceasefire, for instance, or a verified halt to strikes on civilian infrastructure. Without that, the talks risk becoming another round of meetings that the missiles interrupt.

What to Watch Next

Tuesday and Wednesday in Abu Dhabi: whether the delegations move beyond opening positions. Watch for any agreement on an energy ceasefire or a halt to strikes on civilian infrastructure — that would be the most immediate, verifiable deliverable, and the one that would matter most to Ukrainians facing winter.
The Patriot question: whether the United States announces new interceptor supplies or air-defence assistance before or during the talks. Mr Zelenskyy has made this his most specific ask, and the interception rate from Saturday night is his strongest argument.
Forensic confirmation on the KN-23: whether Ukrainian investigators confirm North Korean missiles were used, and how Washington, Seoul and the United Nations respond. A confirmed finding would put new pressure on sanctions enforcement.
Repairs in Kyiv: how quickly engineers restore transmission from the Rivne and Khmelnytskyi plants and reopen the Northern Bridge. The speed of recovery is a measure of the grid’s resilience — and of how much damage the next barrage can do.
The APEC horizon: whether the mooted three-way meeting between Presidents Trump, Putin and Xi in Shenzhen on 18 and 19 November is confirmed. If it happens, it would be the first time the three leaders have sat down together over this war, and it would reframe everything Abu Dhabi produces.

Sources