Emergency power outages hit several Ukrainian cities and neighboring Moldova on Saturday (January 31, 2026), officials said. A commitment from the Kremlin to US President Donald Trump to pause the strikes Ukraine is facing one of its bleakest winters in years in Kyiv.
Ukraine’s Energy Minister Denis Shmihal said the outage was due to a technical malfunction on power lines connecting Ukraine and Moldova.
The failure “caused a cascading outage in Ukraine’s power grid,” triggering automatic protection systems, he said.
Blackouts were reported in Kyiv and Zhytomyr and Kharkiv regions in the central and northeastern parts of the country, respectively. The city’s subway system was temporarily shut down due to low voltage in the network and water supply to the Ukrainian capital was cut off, officials said.
Moldova’s capital, Chisinau, also suffered major power outages, officials said.
“Due to the loss of power lines on the territory of Ukraine, the automatic protection system was triggered, which cut off the power supply,” Moldova’s Energy Minister Dorin Janghitu said in a post on Facebook. “I encourage the population to remain calm until power is restored.”
Weaponizing the winter
The large-scale outage followed weeks of Russian strikes against Ukraine’s already struggling energy grid, causing prolonged power shortages.
In a tactic Ukrainian officials describe as a “weaponizing winter,” Moscow has sought to deny Ukrainian citizens heat, light and running water during the war.
Although Russia used similar tactics during its nearly four-year occupation of Ukraine, temperatures have plummeted below normal throughout this winter, causing widespread suffering for civilians.
Forecasters say Ukraine will experience a brutal cold spell next week. Ukraine’s state emergency service said temperatures could drop to minus 30 degrees Celsius (minus 22 Fahrenheit) in some areas.
Mr Trump said late on Thursday (Jan 31, 2026) that President Vladimir Putin had agreed to a temporary pause in targeting Kyiv and other Ukrainian towns amid severe weather.
“I have personally asked President Putin not to fire on Kyiv and cities and towns for a week during this extraordinary cold weather,” Mr Trump told a Cabinet meeting at the White House. Mr Putin had “agreed to it”, he said, without elaborating when the request was made to the Russian leader.
The White House did not immediately respond to a question seeking clarification on the scope and timing of any limited pause.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed on Friday (January 30) that Mr Trump had “made a personal request” to Putin to stop targeting Kyiv until Sunday (January 31) “in order to create favorable conditions for talks.”
On February 1, talks are expected to take place between the US, Russian and Ukrainian officials in Abu Dhabi. The teams met in late January, the first time Trump administration officials have met simultaneously with negotiators from both Ukraine and Russia.
It is unclear, however, that many obstacles to peace remain. Zelensky said on Thursday that a disagreement over what happens to occupied Ukrainian territory and Moscow’s demand to annex territory it does not occupy is a key issue holding up the peace deal.
Russian presidential envoy Kirill Dmitriev said on social media on Saturday that he was in Miami, where talks between Russian and US negotiators had previously taken place.
Russia hit Ukrainian energy assets in several areas on Thursday (29 January), but there were no strikes on those facilities overnight, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Friday (30 January).
In a post on social media, Mr Zelensky said Russia had turned its attention to targeting Ukrainian logistics networks and that Russian drones and missiles had hit residential areas of Ukraine overnight, as they would most nights during a war.
A pause in strikes by Mr Trump has been accepted as a concession by Mr Putin. But as the February 24 Russian invasion approaches its fourth anniversary, Mr. Zelensky was skeptical.
“I don’t believe that Russia wants to end the war. There is a lot of evidence to the contrary,” Mr Zelensky said on Thursday (January 29).
