President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko traded fresh accusations on Friday of failing to prepare the Ukrainian capital for new Russian strikes that have plunged the city into unprecedented power and water outages, Reuters reported.

Source: Reuters

The city of more than 3 million is entering another winter of attacks on energy facilities that are sparking long periods of emergency power cuts, as Ukraine struggles amid a shortage of air-defence weapons to down fast-moving missiles and drones. The rumble of generators has returned to torch-lit streets, with temperatures nearing freezing and residents still waiting for centralised heating to return. City-wide water outages last hours, and are more frequent than in previous years.

Kyiv's bridges across the sweeping Dnipro River have also come under attack for the first time in Russia's nearly five-year war, snarling traffic, and outages have frequently halted metro services, Reuters said.

"Extremely serious" — the president's charge

Zelenskiy, in his latest criticism of Kyiv's management, called the challenges "extremely serious" and said the city faced the worst energy situation in the country. "In fact, these are the consequences of the failure to implement decisions at the city level on preparations for the heating season, as well as of this Russian operation against Ukraine's energy infrastructure," he wrote on X.

Less than an hour later, Klitschko responded in a video address in which he suggested the government had "cynically" dragged its feet in approving a resilience plan for the city, and in two separate statements on Friday he described Zelenskiy's criticism of Kyiv as "constant manipulations". "Because in its attempts to get rid of Klitschko in any way possible, in creating constant obstacles and not helping the capital, the central government is effectively destroying Kyiv," he said.

Klitschko also argued that without air defence protecting key facilities, their survival itself was in question: "With this kind of intensity of enemy attacks, without protecting key facilities with air-defence systems, the restoration, stable operation, and very existence of these facilities is under major question," he said. In comments reported from a separate interview, the mayor said generators cannot cover the capital's needs — Kyiv requires approximately 2 gigawatts of power, while 104 generators and power plants totalling 16 megawatts have been installed for the water-supply system alone — and that street lighting is almost completely out of order.

A long-running feud, now in the open

The barbs are the latest in a long-running feud between Zelenskiy, a former TV comedian elected in 2019, and Klitschko, an ex-champion boxer who has served as mayor since 2014. Wartime elections are prohibited in Ukraine, meaning both men have remained in office beyond their terms. Earlier in the war, Zelenskiy had criticised city officials for the state of Kyiv's bomb shelters after three people were killed running to a locked shelter.

In an interview with Ukrainian public broadcaster Suspilne released on Thursday, Klitschko said his calls for a meeting with Zelenskiy to address Kyiv's problems had gone unanswered. His remarks came days after Zelenskiy said he had approached a number of top ex-officials to lead Kyiv's military administration — a parallel wartime authority answerable to the president — but that none had agreed. Speaking to reporters, Zelenskiy said it was "difficult" for Klitschko and presidential appointees to work together: "Because as soon as we start talking to some managers about how to strengthen Kyiv, the mayor gets the impression that someone wants to replace him," Suspilne quoted him as saying.

Friday's row sits on top of the heaviest week of Russia's autumn energy campaign — overnight into Friday alone, Ukraine's air force said Russia launched 227 attack drones, of which air defences shot down or suppressed 196. Read more: Russia's 227-drone overnight wave

For Kyiv's residents, the argument changes nothing tonight: generators are running, heating is still awaited, and both men agree on one point — the Russian operation against the energy grid is the cause they are fighting over how to survive.