A “megastorm” killed two people and left some three million residents without power in Russia and areas of Ukraine under Russian occupation, the Russian Ministry of Emergency Situations announced Monday.
The most affected regions are Crimea, a peninsula annexed in 2014, southern Russia and the partially occupied regions of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson in Ukraine, said the Ministry of Energy, quoted by the TASS news agency.
Dubbed the “storm of the century” and “megastorm” by Russian media, the storm began to make itself felt on Sunday, according to emergency services.
The deaths occurred near Sudak, a Ukrainian city in southern occupied Crimea, and the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi, according to TASS.
The Russian governor of Crimea, Sergei Aksionov, announced on social networks that he ordered people not to go to work during the day on Monday and decreed the closure of all educational establishments due to bad weather.
He also declared a state of emergency in several regions of the Ukrainian peninsula, annexed by Russia in 2014.
“We are living a true ‘Armageddon’ [batalha entre as forças do bem e do mal]”The inhabitants do not remember ever seeing such strong winds and waves,” the speaker of the Crimean Parliament, Vladimir Konstantinov, told the Russian television channel Rossya 24.
According to TASS, more than 500 animals died after the flooding of the Sevastopol Museum-Aquarium pavilion.
“The wind speed of the hurricane in Crimea reached 144 kilometers per hour. It became the strongest in the last 16 years,” said Deputy Director of the Department of Hydrometeorology and Environmental Monitoring of Crimea, Tatyana Lyubetskaya.
In Ukraine, authorities said more than 2,000 cities were plunged into darkness as a violent snowstorm swept through the country, whose power system is already under strain from Russian bombing.
Ukraine fears a new campaign of massive Russian attacks on essential infrastructure in winter, just as in 2022, when such attacks plunged millions of people into the cold and darkness.
“In total, in 2019 localities in 16 regions were left without electricity,” said the Ministry of the Interior of Ukraine, quoted by the French agency AFP.
The storm caused damage to roads: 1,370 trucks were forced to temporarily stop and 840 vehicles had to be towed, he added.
In the southern city of Odessa, which is regularly targeted by Russian attacks, authorities said they had helped 1,624 people who were trapped in the snow.
Temperatures dropped below zero and there were strong gusts of wind, according to the same source.
Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, triggering a war with numerous civilian and military casualties on both sides, as well as the destruction of much of Ukrainian infrastructure.
Source: TSF
