New Delhi, Oct. 17 -- KYIV - The lights flickered first, then went out across blocks of central Kyiv, sending commuters hunting for phone flashlights and station attendants scrambling to keep the metro running on reserve power. By Monday, Oct. 13, 2025, Day 1327 of the war, Ukraine's grid managers were back in crisis mode, rationing electricity after fresh damage met an already thin system. The outages were terse reminders that Russia's battlefield pressure is now paired with a campaign to strain basic services heading into another long winter. In recent days, officials also described a network overload that triggered blackouts across Kyiv and beyond, the latest measure of a grid learning to bend rather than break.

To the northeast, offi...