Shades of darkness by Texty.org.ua

In 2022, regular Russian shelling has repeatedly caused blackouts in Ukrainian cities.The last three months of the year were the darkest ones for Ukrainians.

We visualized the average number of outages per day in Kyiv, the capital, and Lviv, the West Ukrainian hub for IDPs, refugees and volunteers. Most of the data we received from readers who responded to our public request. Some Smart House devices or security systems have a notification system for each disconnection and restoration of power supply. The idea for data retrieving came from our data journalist who was able to transfer such data from the Ajax home alarm mobile application to a Google spreadsheet. Also we used data collected from open Telegram bots, which are often created by residents for their resident building.

It is important that any government or municipal data on factual outages nor publicized, neither delivered to residents personally. Ukrainian energy companies attempted to reduce the number of power outages to a minimum and make them more predictable. Sometimes expectations were worse than reality (luckily), sometimes they matched. Anyway, everyone in big Ukrainian cities experienced at least one 24h+ power outage, and many times for 12h+.

You can see on the infographic which periods were the darkest, and which ones brought back hope for energy stability. Also you can see the "magic" that energy companies gave to Ukrainians for Christmas, despite the continued shelling from Russia.