A severe storm has left nearly two million people in Russia and occupied Ukraine without electricity over the weekend.
"About 1.9 million people remained without power supply as of 10:00 Moscow time due to unfavorable weather conditions," Moscow's energy ministry said on Monday, November 27, listing the Russian regions of Dagestan, Krasnodar and Rostov, as well as the occupied Ukrainian regions of Crimea, Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.
The storm prompted several Crimean regions to declare a state of emergency after it became the strongest recorded in the past 16 years with wind speeds reaching almost 90 mph, Tatyana Lyubetskaya, a Russia-installed official at the Crimean environmental monitoring department, told Russian state news agency Tass. In an aquarium in Sevastopol, around 800 exotic fish and animals died after the room they were in was flooded, the Crimea 24 TV channel reported.
In Ukraine, where the energy infrastructure has been targeted systematically by Russian forces, "2,019 settlements in 16 regions are cut off from the grid," the interior ministry said. In the southern city of Odesa, which has been subjected to repeated Russian strikes, authorities said they had helped 1,624 people who had been trapped due to snow. Regional authorities said the temperature had fallen to below freezing with reports of gusts of up to 72 kilometers per hour.
The storm was part of a weather front that earlier left one person dead and hundreds of places without electricity amid heavy snowfall and strong blizzards in Romania and Moldova on Sunday.