Kherson residents urged to leave as Russian strikes threaten power and heating
Residents of the southern Ukrainian city of Kherson have been urged to leave after Russian strikes badly damaged a district heating plant and raised the risk of prolonged electricity and heating outages. Regional governor Oleksandr Prokudin said the situation in the city was extremely difficult and warned that the attacks were intensifying. He specifically called on families with children and elderly people to leave if they were able to do so.
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Prokudin said Russian forces attacked Kherson's district heating plant overnight with glide bombs, causing very serious damage. He said the city could be left without electricity or heating not just for hours or days, but for a longer period. The governor made the appeal on Telegram, according to the supplied report, and said the enemy was striking the region's critical infrastructure every day.
The warning comes as Kherson faces renewed pressure on civilian services during the wider war. The city had about 280,000 inhabitants before Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022, and it has remained exposed to regular shelling since Russian forces withdrew from the city in November 2022. Russian troops are now positioned across the Dnipro river and continue to target the area from the opposite bank.
The damage to heating and power infrastructure is significant because it affects basic civilian survival, especially as colder weather approaches. Ukraine has repeatedly faced attacks on energy facilities during the war, and last winter Russian strikes on power plants left millions of people without heat and electricity. The latest warning from Kherson officials suggests the city may again be entering a period of severe strain on essential services.
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The attack also fits a broader pattern of long-range strikes on civilian infrastructure that has intensified in recent months. The supplied report says Russia and Ukraine have both been ramping up such strikes, with logistics warehouses, oil facilities and port infrastructure among the targets. In Kherson, the immediate concern is whether damaged systems can be repaired quickly enough to prevent a prolonged outage.
What remains unclear is how long the heating plant will take to restore and whether electricity supplies will also be disrupted for an extended period. It is also not clear how many residents will leave the city in response to the governor's appeal. For now, officials are warning that the security situation remains severe and that further attacks on critical infrastructure are possible.
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