The Russian energy ministry did not say what had caused the outages but Russian media reported that two pylons in the Kherson region of Ukraine north of Crimea had been blown up by Ukrainian nationalists.
Advertisement
The power lines were knocked down by saboteurs Sunday, forcing millions of residents to live without electricity.
The issue of supplies coming from Ukraine has been a repeated source of tension in recent months, with Tatar and other activists also trying in September to blockade the main road leading to Crimea from Ukraine, which claims Crimea and still supplies some food and utilities to the peninsula. Earlier, Ukraine responded to a Russian demand to restore power by suspending all goods deliveries to the Russian-annexed peninsula.
Russian Federation annexed Crimea in March 2014, plunging relations with Ukraine and the West into deep freeze. “There can’t be a free economic zone in territories where bandits rule and where human rights are rudely violated”, Mustafa Jemilev, a Ukrainian lawmaker and Crimean Tatar leader, said at a government meeting Monday.
The prosecutor noted that many of those hindering the fix work had come to Ukraine from Crimean territory, but their part in the attacks was still to be established. The electricity supply was severed on Saturday when a series of explosions toppled power poles located inside Ukraine, Deutsche Welle reports today.
The Russian-backed Crimean government has already said it fears the state of emergency could last until late December, when Russia will finally be able to trial its energy link with Crimea, which is now under construction. Most of the peninsula still has little or no power, and the Crimean government has declared a state of emergency, as Ukrainian protesters block utility crews from repairing the damage.
It was unclear who was responsible for the attack.
A Ukrainian police representative from Kherson region said police had blocked off the area surrounding the damaged pylons yesterday to allow repairs.
“Crimeans will not be brought to their knees … or spoken to in the language of blackmail”, he was quoted as saying by the TASS news agency on Sunday.
Russian Federation is laying undersea cables to Crimea to ease dependence on Kiev and is also planning to build gas-powered power stations which would burn gas piped from the mainland.
Advertisement
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 them with regular buses on some routes.
