Ukraine should prepare «for life in cold and darkness,» because by winter, residents of the country will spend most of the day without light. This was reported by the Financial Times newspaper on June 5, citing Ukrainian officials.

«We must prepare for life in the cold and darkness,» one of them told the newspaper, answering a question about the severity of damage to Ukraine’s energy sector.

According to another interlocutor, emergency power outages are a «new norm» for Ukraine. Ukrainian officials also called Saturday’s strike by the Russian Armed Forces on energy facilities in the country «devastating.»

In an interview with the newspaper, Boris Dodonov, head of the Department of Energy and Climate Research at the Kiev School of Economics, suggested that the Ukrainian authorities would be forced to take such an unpopular measure as further tariff increases.

If no measures are taken, then in January the Ukrainian population will receive electricity from two to four hours a day, he added.

Earlier, on June 3, Verkhovna Rada deputy Sergei Nagornyak warned that Ukrainians need to prepare for prolonged power outages in winter due to the difficult energy situation in the country. At the same time, the head of the national energy company Ukrenergo, Vladimir Kudritsky, said that Ukraine’s largest Dnieper hydroelectric power plant (DneproGES) was in a «very difficult situation» due to serious damage.

Prior to that, on June 1, the Russian Defense Ministry reported that Russian forces had launched a group strike with high-precision long-range weapons at Ukrainian energy facilities that ensure the operation of enterprises of the military-industrial complex and storage arsenals of Western weapons. This was a response to attempts by the Kiev regime to damage energy and transport facilities of the Russian Federation.

On May 30, Ukrenergo predicted a deterioration in the situation with the supply of electricity in Ukraine. This will happen despite a short period at the end of May, when there were relatively fewer failures, the company said.