Russian strikes destroy Kherson's last working power plant equipment ahead of winter

Russian forces destroyed the last operating generating equipment at Kherson's combined heat and power plant in an overnight bombing raid, leaving the front-line city on the Dnipro River without a functioning source of heat six weeks before Ukraine's winter heating season is due to begin. State energy company Naftogaz Group said on its official channel that four guided glide bombs struck the plant's premises overnight into August 27, a second and more devastating strike after Russian aircraft had already hit the facility with an aerial bomb the previous day.

No injuries were reported at the plant; staff had taken shelter before the bombs landed, according to Ukrainian reporting on the strike. But officials said the destruction was total. Acting Naftogaz chairman Serhii Fedorenko said the plant's remaining heat- and power-generating equipment was "completely destroyed and put out of service," a judgment echoed by Oleksandr Prokudin, head of the Kherson Regional Military Administration, who told residents the city "can no longer count on the plant or other critical infrastructure facilities operating as usual this winter" and urged families with children and elderly relatives to leave for safer regions.

A bombardment that has accelerated for months

The strike is the latest and most severe in a monthslong intensification of Russian air attacks on Kherson, which sits on the Ukrainian-held west bank of the Dnipro, directly across the river from Russian positions. Naftogaz says its facilities nationwide have been hit 293 times since the start of 2026, with the tempo of attacks more than double that of previous years. In Kherson Oblast specifically, Russian forces have dropped 170 guided aerial bombs since July 1 alone — more than in the entire first half of the year combined — alongside more than 1,700 attack drones over the past two months and roughly 6,500 small first-person-view drone strikes in a single week, according to figures reported by Ukraine's state news agency.

Kherson was occupied by Russian troops for eight months in 2022 and has remained within range of Russian artillery, drones and glide bombs ever since Ukrainian forces recaptured it that November. Roughly 60,000 residents remain in the city today, more than 4,000 of them children, down from a pre-war population above 280,000. The combined heat and power plant, run by Naftogaz, supplies heating to a large share of the city's residential buildings and has been struck repeatedly over the past two years, but officials say this week's damage is the first to knock out all of its remaining capacity at once. The city's infrastructure has already absorbed a series of major blows since Russia's full-scale invasion, including the June 2023 destruction of the nearby Kakhovka dam, which flooded parts of the region and cut off a major source of drinking water.

Russia has targeted Ukraine's power and heating infrastructure every autumn since the war began in 2022, triggering rolling nationwide blackouts in previous winters as missiles and drones struck substations, transformers and generating plants far from the front line. This year's campaign has been concentrated more heavily on front-line and near-front-line regions such as Kherson, where the short distance from Russian-held territory across the Dnipro allows glide bombs — cheaper, largely unguided munitions dropped from aircraft that release them outside the range of most Ukrainian air defenses — to reach targets with little warning.

Tens of thousands facing a winter without heat

The immediate consequence, officials say, is that Kherson cannot expect centralized heating this winter, forcing families to weigh evacuation against staying in a city that has already lost most of its pre-war population. Regional authorities have organized daily evacuation trains to Khmelnytskyi, in western Ukraine, and published hotline numbers for residents seeking help relocating.

The strike lands against a backdrop of rising danger to civilians and aid workers across the Kherson region. In a statement on August 14, the United Nations Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator in Ukraine, Matthias Schmale, said attacks on humanitarian workers and assets had risen 38 percent in the first quarter of 2026, with six aid workers killed in Ukraine during the first half of the year, including two deminers working in Kherson.

"This attack has no military purpose. Its sole aim is to terrorize civilians and attempt to deprive tens of thousands of Kherson residents of a source of heat ahead of the heating season."

That assessment, from Fedorenko, came less than a week after President Volodymyr Zelensky signed a decree honoring four of the plant's own workers — a carpenter, a driver, a painter and the technical director — with the Order "For Courage" for their service, part of a broader round of Independence Day state awards reported by the regional outlet Most on August 24. Days later, the facility those workers keep running was knocked offline entirely.

Reaction from Kyiv, the UN and Brussels

Ukrainian officials have cast the strikes as part of a deliberate campaign to make the country's south uninhabitable ahead of winter, a tactic Kyiv says Russia has repeated in various forms since 2022. The United Nations' humanitarian office in Ukraine has separately warned that humanitarian personnel and civilian infrastructure are protected under international humanitarian law and that attacks on them "should be considered war crimes."

The European Union has also drawn attention to the scale of civilian harm nationwide. In a statement to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the EU's diplomatic service said Russia had intensified its attacks on Ukrainian cities and energy infrastructure, noting that June 2026 alone brought at least 293 civilian deaths and 1,990 injuries — the highest monthly toll since April 2022 — with casualties for the first half of the year running 37 percent above 2025 levels. Brussels has repeatedly pledged support for repairing Ukraine's energy system, which the EU says has lost a majority of its pre-war generating capacity to Russian strikes over the course of the war.

Moscow did not immediately comment on the Kherson strike. Russia has consistently denied deliberately targeting civilians in Ukraine, characterizing strikes on energy facilities as attacks on infrastructure that supports Ukraine's military.

What happens next

Kherson's regional administration says it is prioritizing evacuation logistics over emergency repairs, since officials do not expect the plant to be restorable before winter sets in. Naftogaz has not announced a timeline or cost estimate for rebuilding the destroyed equipment. Nationally, Ukraine's power system has lost a large share of its pre-war generating capacity over the course of the war, and the EU-backed Ukraine Energy Support Fund — which has already channeled hundreds of millions of euros toward transformers and mobile gas turbines — is one of the main mechanisms Kyiv is counting on to help close the gap before winter. Kherson's fate now depends heavily on how much of its remaining population accepts the government's call to relocate, and on whether Russian strikes on the wider regional grid — which has already absorbed 170 guided bombs since July — continue at their current pace through the autumn.