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Good morning from a very foggy Kyiv where the damage to civilian infrastructure caused by Russia’s latest mass missile attack on Wednesday continues to cause major disruption both here and across the rest of Ukraine.

What’s happening today?

Today’s priority is the continuing repair work to the water and electricity supplies in towns and cities across the country. The situation remains grim, with winter setting in and temperatures in the capital hovering just above freezing. 

Yet despite the bleak conditions, Ukraine remains defiant. In a BBC interview with Olena Zelenska on Wednesday, the Ukrainian first lady said: “We are ready to endure this.”

“We’ve had so many terrible challenges, seen so many victims, so much destruction, that blackouts are not the worst thing to happen to us.”

You can read more about the current power situation here (LINK TO EXPLAINER)

What has Zelensky said?

In his daily address on Thursday evening, President Zelensky acknowledged the “difficult” situation Ukrainians are currently facing, adding: “Special attention is being paid to the communication system. No matter what the terrorists are planning, we have to preserve communication.”

On Russia’s continuing tactic of bombarding cities from afar, Zelensky said this was because they “do not know how to fight.” 

He added: “The only thing they can still do is terrorize. Either energy terror, artillery terror or missile terror – that’s all that Russia has degraded to under its current leaders.”

Any other news I need to know about?

Of course, here’s a roundup of the morning’s top stories:

• The UK foreign secretary, James Cleverly, travelled to Kyiv on Thursday to meet the Ukrainian leadership and promise the UK’s support for as long as it takes to defeat Russia’s brutal efforts to break the country’s resolve;
• The BBC has a great feature on the race to rebuild infrastructure in Kherson; and
• New pictures from Nasa show just how devastating Russia’s strikes against Ukraine have been.

What’s the situation on the front lines? 

In its Nov. 25 Intelligence Update, the U.K.’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) focuses on the experiences of mobilized Russian reservists, outlining a number of serious problems they face and the massive casualties they’re suffering, as well as the political risk this situation poses to the Kremlin.

The MoD says: “In Donetsk Oblast, reservists have been killed in large numbers in frontal assaults into well-established Ukrainian defensive zones around the town of Bakhmut.

“The Kremlin will likely be concerned that an increasing number of reservists’ families are prepared to risk arrest by protesting against the conditions their relatives are serving under.”

And that’s it for today’s Morning Memo. Kyiv Post will bring you the latest news throughout the day and we’ll be back with another edition tomorrow.

The post Kyiv Post Morning Memo – Everything You Need to Know on Friday, Nov. 25 appeared first on Kyiv Post.

Ukraine is still battling to restore water and power to millions of its citizens after Russia’s latest mass missile strike on civilian infrastructure on Wednesday, Nov. 23 battered an already crippled electricity grid.

The situation is a grim one right across the entire country with winter setting in and temperatures in the capital of Kyiv hovering just above freezing.

Such is the scale of the power outages that their effects are clearly visible from space.

“The situation with electricity remains difficult in almost all regions,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on the evening of Thursday, Nov. 24. “However, we are gradually moving away from blackouts — every hour we return power to new consumers.”

Kyiv

More than 24 hours after Russian strikes smashed Kyiv, mayor Vitaliy Klitschko said late Thursday that 60 percent of homes in the capital were still suffering emergency outages.

Water services had been fully restored however, city officials said. But the shelling had killed seven people at Vyshgorod, on the outskirts of the capital, said Oleksiy Kuleba, head of the Kyiv Regional Military Administration.

Khmelnytsky

The western region of Khmelnytsky was one of the worst affected by power outages, with just 35 percent of its normal capacity, but that was enough to connect critical infrastructure, according to Serhiy Hamaliy, the head of the regional administration.

Kherson

The recently-liberated southern city of Kherson has been largely without power and water since Russian forces destroyed critical infrastructure when they were forced to retreat earlier this month.

Residents also now face a new threat – shelling from the Russian army in its new positions on the other side of the Dnipro River. A fresh round of strikes Thursday killed at least four people, a senior official there said.

Kharkiv

About 300,000 residents in the eastern Kharkiv region, near the border with Russia, were still without power on Thursday evening, but electricity supply had been restored for nearly 70 percent of consumers, AFP reports.

“We’ve restarted power supplies,” said Ihor Terekhov, mayor of Kharkiv city, adding that water was being restored to homes and municipal workers were reconnecting public transport.

“Believe me, it was very difficult.”

Nuclear power stations

Wednesday’s attacks disconnected three Ukrainian nuclear plants automatically from the national grid and triggered blackouts in the neighbouring country of Moldova, where the energy network is linked to Ukraine.

All three nuclear facilities had been reconnected by Thursday morning.

Why is Russia doing this?

After numerous defeats on the battlefield, Russia is now resorting to trying to bomb Ukrainian civilians into submission. It then hopes Kyiv will be forced into negotiations on terms favourable to the Kremlin.

The Kremlin said Ukraine was ultimately responsible for the fallout from the strikes, and that Kyiv could end the strikes by acquiescing to Russian demands.

Ukraine “has every opportunity to settle the situation, to fulfil Russia’s demands and as a result, end all possible suffering of the civilian population,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

What is Ukraine’s response to this?

There is absolutely no indication that the tactic will work. “The way they fight and target civil infrastructure, it can cause nothing but fury,” said Oleksiy Yakovlenko, chief administrator at a hospital in Ukraine’s eastern city of Kramatorsk, Donetsk Region.

And in a BBC interview with Olena Zelenska on Wednesday, the Ukrainian first lady said: “We are ready to endure this.

“We’ve had so many terrible challenges, seen so many victims, so much destruction, that blackouts are not the worst thing to happen to us.”

What is in store over the coming weeks?

Russia is expected to launch more missile strikes against civilian infrastructure and the World Health Organization has warned of “life-threatening” consequences and estimated that millions could leave their homes as a result.

How is the rest of the world trying to help?

European Parliament President Roberta Metsola this week launched an appeal to get vitally needed equipment to the EU’s war-torn eastern neighbor.

“Ukrainians are currently without electricity as a result of Russia’s attacks on critical civilian infrastructure,” Metsola said.

Dario Nardella, mayor of the Italian city of Florence, who heads a network of local authorities in Europe, said he was looking to coordinate a group of 200 cities around the continent to send generators they have in storage to Ukraine.

“We’ve got the potential of sending several hundred, even industrial-sized, generators which will be able to produce quite a lot of power,” Nardella said.

Andriy Yermak, chief of staff at the Ukrainian presidency, said that generators were needed to help ensure people’s basic needs as Russia continues to bombard Ukraine.

But he said the top priority for Kyiv was to get other heavy equipment needed for the “immediate recovery” of the country’s power grid.

“We need to ensure generation and sustainable distribution of energy to sustain our economy,” Yermak said.

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Ukraine’s government appealed to people to conserve energy amid relentless Russian strikes that have halved the country’s power capacity, as the United Nations health body warned of a humanitarian disaster in Ukraine this winter.

* Ukraine’s national power grid operator said the damage dealt to Ukrainian power-generating facilities by Russian missile attacks was “colossal” but he dismissed the need to evacuate civilians.

* The Kremlin said no substantive progress had been made towards creating a security zone around Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine, once again accusing Kyiv of shelling at the plant and risking a nuclear incident.

* There are no immediate nuclear safety or security concerns at the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia reactor complex despite shelling at the weekend that caused widespread damage, the U.N. atomic watchdog said after its experts toured the site.

* Moscow and Kyiv blame each other for repeated shelling in the immediate area of the facility.
CONFLICT

* Battles continued to rage in the east, where Russia has sent some of the forces it moved following its withdrawal from around the city of Kherson in the south. Moscow is pressing an offensive of its own along a stretch of frontline west of the city of Donetsk, held by its proxies since 2014.

* “The enemy does not stop shelling the positions of our troops and settlements near the contact line (in the Donetsk region),” the General Staff of the Ukrainian Armed Forces said.

* Russian air defences repelled two drone attacks in Crimea, annexed from Ukraine in 2014, including one targeting a thermal power station near Sevastopol, the home port of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, the regional governor said.

* Russian shelling hit a humanitarian aid distribution centre in the town of Orihiv in southeastern Ukraine, killing a volunteer and wounding two women, the regional governor said.

* Reuters could not independently verify the battlefield accounts.

* Ukraine’s SBU security service and police raided a 1,000-year-old Orthodox Christian monastery in Kyiv as part of operations to counter suspected “subversive activities by Russian special services”, the SBU said.

* Russia’s Orthodox Church condemned the raid as an “act of intimidation”.

* Russian President Vladimir Putin will in the coming days meet the mothers of reservists called up to fight in Ukraine, the Kremlin said.

* Chancellor Olaf Scholz said Germany must be ready for the situation in Ukraine to escalate but that his recent trip to China was worth it alone for spelling out the two countries’ joint stance against using nuclear weapons.

* Disbursement of $4.5 billion in U.S. economic aid for Ukraine will begin in the coming weeks, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said.

“Stock up on warm clothes, blankets, think about options that will help you wait a long outage. It’s better to do it now than to be miserable.” –Sergey Kovalenko, the head of YASNO, which provides energy for Kyiv.

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The British government banned the installation of Chinese-linked security cameras at sensitive facilities due to security risks.

Reuters reports that the British government ordered its departments to stop installing Chinese security cameras at sensitive buildings due to security risks. The Government has ordered departments to disconnect the camera from core networks and to consider removing them.

“The decision comes after a review of “current and future possible security risks associated with the installation of visual surveillance systems on the government estate,” cabinet office minister Oliver Dowden said in a written statement to parliament.” states Reuters.

The security cameras of the two Chinese firms are widely adopted by a number of government departments, including the interior and business ministries.

Dowden pointed out that the surveillance cameras must be carefully scrutinized because of their capability and connectivity of these systems.

“The review has concluded that, in light of the threat to the UK and the increasing capability and connectivity of these systems, additional controls are required,” Dowden said. “Departments have therefore been instructed to cease deployment of such equipment onto sensitive sites, where it is produced by companies subject to the National Intelligence Law of the People’s Republic of China.”

The risk is related to the use of security cameras manufactured by Chinese-owned companies Dahua and Hikvision. Both companies are also on the Covered List maintained by the the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

The Covered List, published by Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau published, included products and services that could pose an unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States or the security and safety of United States persons.

Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, security cameras)

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