Mass Blackout in Crimea

June 13, 2018

The annexed Crimean peninsula has reportedly suffered a mass power outage on Wednesday.

Phone lines were down, traffic lights stopped working and trolley buses halted in their tracks in several cities on the Black Sea peninsula, the pro-Moscow Krym Inform news agency reported.

Crimeans have suffered repeated power shortages since Russia seized the territory from Ukraine in 2014.

Crimea plunged into weeks of darkness in 2015 after electricity pylons were blown up in Ukraine. Last year, Russia’s Energy Ministry began enforcing temporary blackouts to prevent overloading the energy supply system, leaving 100,000 Crimeans without air conditioning in the region.

An accident at a substation in mainland Russia may have caused the latest outage in Crimea, an unnamed emergency services source told state-run TASS news agency. Russian news outlet reported the blackout was due to a fire at a substation in the Krasnodar area.

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