Ukraine is racing to restore electricity after Russian strikes on its energy network over the weekend left about 850,000 people without power, as the country heads into another wartime winter with temperatures already near freezing.

Power company DTEK said more than 600,000 residents of the central Dnipropetrovsk region lost power after overnight strikes damaged key energy facilities, with repeated attacks complicating repairs. In the north-eastern Kharkiv region, a Russian drone hit a critical infrastructure facility, leaving nearly 250,000 customers without power, according to the mayor of Zlatopil, Mykola Baksheyev. Ukraine's air force said Russia launched 164 drones, including 112 jet-powered ones, and three guided missiles overnight, and that defences shot down or suppressed 137 of them.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said 12 regions came under attack, with Kyiv hit hardest, and that substations linking the Rivne and Khmelnytskyi nuclear power plants to Kyiv and central Ukraine were struck. The Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant lost its external power supply after damage to a power line and was forced onto emergency generators for cooling.

Ukraine's energy ministry said on Monday that shelling over the past day had damaged power lines in Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkiv and Chernihiv regions, and that more than 9,000 consumers had been reconnected overnight. The grid operator has imposed emergency power cuts in Kharkiv, Sumy and Poltava, and officials have given no date for full restoration in the worst-hit areas. The strikes come a day before US-brokered trilateral talks are due to open in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday.