Power blackouts across Ukraine amid Russian shelling

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukraine's state electricity operator on Saturday announced blackouts in Kyiv and seven other regions of the country in the aftermath of Russia's devastating strikes on energy infrastructure.

The move comes as Russian forces continue to pound Ukrainian cities and villages with missiles and drones, inflicting damage on power plants, water supplies and other civilian targets, in a grinding war that is nearing its nine-month mark.

Russia has denied that the drones it has used in Ukraine came from Iran, but the Islamic Republic's foreign minister on Saturday for the first time acknowledged supplying Moscow with “a limited number” of drones before the invasion.

Hossein Amirabdollahian claimed, however, that Tehran didn't know if its drones were used against Ukraine and stated Iran's commitment to stopping the conflict.

Ukrenergo, the sole operator of Ukraine's high-voltage transmission lines, initially said in a an online statement Saturday that scheduled blackouts will take place in the capital and the greater Kyiv region, as well as several regions around it — Chernihiv, Cherkasy, Zhytomyr, Sumy, Poltava and Kharkiv.

Later in the day, however, the company released an update saying that scheduled outages for a specific number of hours aren't enough and instead there will be emergency outages, which could last an indefinite amount of time.

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