Russian strikes have left half of Ukraine’s battered energy grid in need of repair, as concerns mount about the country’s power supply as winter looms.

Some 10 million Ukrainians were without power Friday, according to President Volodymyr Zelensky. That figure accounts for roughly a quarter of Ukraine’s peacetime population — and likely closer to 40% of wartime households.

“Unfortunately Russia continues to carry out missile strikes on Ukraine’s civilian and critical infrastructure. Almost half of our energy system is disabled,” Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said.

In the capital, Kyiv — where temperatures were expected to stay below freezing on Friday — mayor Vitali Klitschko called the situation “critical.”

Roughly half of the city’s civilian population is routinely left without power as the country’s electrical utility institutes planned blackouts to more equitably distribute what’s left of the country’s generating capacity.

That arrangement is expected to continue nationwide, according to grid operator Ukrenergo.

“We need to prepare for possible long outages, but at the moment we are introducing schedules that are planned and will do everything to ensure that the outages are not very long,” Ukrenergo’s head, Volodymyr Kudrytskyi, told Ukrainian state television.

The attacks on Ukraine’s power grid are a concerted effort by the losing Russian forces to erode the Ukrainian will to fight.

Kremlin-aligned lawmaker and retired Russian general Andrey Gurulev said last month on Russian TV that the goal was to leave Kyiv “swimming in s–t” by targeting civilian infrastructure.

“One week after all electricity is cut off, the city of Kyiv will be swimming in s–t, pardon my language,” Gurulev said on Russia’s Channel One in October as Moscow’s bombardment campaign was ramping up. “There will be a clear threat of an epidemic.”

He went on to call for more strikes on Ukraine’s “energy supply systems, banking systems, and the mint that prints the money,” calling such attacks “necessary in order to collapse the country.”

But Klitschko said Friday that the attacks were simply galvanizing Kyiv’s citizens.

“After every rocket attack, I talk to the people, to simple civilians. They (are) not depressed. They were angry, angry and ready to stay and defend our houses, our families and our future,” he said.

Moscow launched a massive wave of rocket and drone attacks against Ukrainian cities on Tuesday, and continued the bombardment this week.

Strikes against power facilities were reported Friday in the northeast province of Kharkiv, the bulk of which Ukrainian forces liberated from Russian occupiers earlier this year.

In the Zaporizhzhia province, Ukrainian authorities said 10 towns had been bombarded by Russian forces. A Thursday rocket strike on an apartment building in the city of Vilniansk killed 10 civilians, including three children, the regional prosecutor’s office said.

Nikopol, a city across the Dnipro River from the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in Enerhodar, was hit by a barrage of Russian rockets, damaging several residential buildings and a power transmission line.

Ground fighting continued in the Donetsk province Friday, with heavy exchanges reported around Bakhmut, the northern Donetsk city at the center of Russia’s offensive efforts.

With wires