Over 500 communities in Ukraine have no electricity - Energy Ministry

MOSCOW. Oct 16 (Interfax) - As of Wednesday morning, 509 communities across Ukraine were fully or partially cut off from power supply for various reasons, Ukrainian media reported with reference to the Energy Ministry.

In particular, a number of customers in the Nikolayev region and the Kiev-controlled part of the Kherson region experienced an emergency outage due to technical problems, media quoted the national power grid operator Ukrenergo as saying.

"Power engineers are working to eliminate the outage causes. All customers should have power supply restored within a few hours," it said.

The Energy Ministry said outages were also reported in the Dnepropetrovsk, Sumy, and Kharkov regions and in the Kiev-controlled part of the Donetsk region.