MOSCOW — Saboteurs blew up the main power lines
leading into Crimea early Sunday, plunging the disputed peninsula into darkness
and prompting the Russian government to impose a state of emergency there.
Most of the more than 1.8 million residents of
the peninsula, annexed by Russia last year, lacked electricity, Russian news agencies
reported, although backup generators were being used to provide power to
hospitals and for other vital purposes.
Sergei V. Aksyonov, the prime minister of
Crimea, asked people not to use electric appliances like heaters — the
temperature was more than 60 degrees — and said streetlights would remain off
to preserve power for more essential purposes.
The government imposed a 10 p.m. curfew on
restaurants and entertainment sites.
The four trunk lines running from Ukraine to Crimea were all damaged, and two
districts in the Ukrainian region of Kherson were also without electricity,
Volodymyr Demchyshyn, the energy minister of Ukraine, said in a statement. Most
of the electricity used in Crimea still comes from Ukraine even after Russia annexed it in March 2014.
Unknown people presumed to be Ukrainian
nationalists knocked out all four of the main electricity lines running through
the Kherson region — the first two were severely damaged on Friday and two more
by explosions just after midnight on Sunday morning.
Officials in Ukraine said some power could be
restored in 24 hours and all four destroyed pylons restored within two or three
days, but they said unidentified demonstrators were preventing repair crews
from getting access to the site.
Six repair brigades had arrived in the area and
were ready to start work, Yuri Kasich, of Ukrenergo, the state agency that runs
the power grid, was quoted as saying by Ukrainian news services. Mr. Kasich
declined to say who was causing the problem, but he said workers had yet to
start the repair work.
The government in Crimea imposed rolling
blackouts on most residential neighborhoods and announced that it had enough
fuel on hand for emergency generators to keep them running for a month.
Crimea announced a day off for nongovernment
workers on Monday, and shut down public services that use a lot of electricity,
like the trolley-bus service in the port city of Sevastopol, replacing it with
regular buses on some routes.
Russia’s Black Sea fleet, which has its headquarters
at Sevastopol, announced that it had not been affected by the power failure.
Reports in Ukraine said that the police had
clashed with activists from the right-wing nationalist Right Sector movement in
the area on Saturday after the initial damage. Ukraine still claims the
peninsula.
When the first two lines were shut down on
Friday, Crimea’s Ministry of Fuel and Energy warned residents that disruptions
in the power supply and other services like cellphones were possible and
suggested that they stock up on batteries, water and other essentials.
Russia plans to replace the electricity supply
from Ukraine with power lines from the Russian mainland, but those are not yet
complete.
In September, activists from the Tatar minority,
which accuses Russia of repressing its members in Crimea, tried to blockade the
roads in the Kherson region used to transport food and other goods to Crimea.
Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its support
for separatists in eastern Ukraine provoked the worst crisis in relations
between Russia and the West since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, with the
West imposing economic sanctions.
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