On September 28, Belgorod Region came under shelling from the American HIMARS missile system, the outlet ASTRA reported. The strike set the main building of the Belgorod thermal power plant on fire and also destroyed the base of a building housing gas turbine units.
Around the same time, the Luch substation was hit. It had already been struck in 2022. Another substation in the village of Blizhnyaya Igumenka in Belgorod District also came under fire. As a result, the city and several districts were left without electricity for more than a day.
At first, the company Rosseti sent out messages claiming that the emergency outage had been caused by “adverse weather conditions.” In fact, the disruption was caused by shelling.
As of the morning of September 29, 77,000 people were still without electricity, Belgorod Region governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said. Power was gradually restored during the day, but electricity returned to the entire city only on the morning of September 30.
A Belgorod resident named Anton said that during the strike on September 28, he was at home in his apartment, playing online with another resident of Belgorod.
“And then suddenly it starts: bang-bang-bang, some strange explosions, sort of a little different from before. We’re sitting there tense, my friend’s lights started flickering, and he says, ‘Maybe my power is about to go out.’ I told him that was nonsense, that it wouldn’t. We kept playing, everything had already stopped exploding, half the city was already without power, but I was still fine. Then maybe ten minutes pass, and my electricity goes out completely, just until the next day,” he said.