Having lived through most difficult winter, Ukraine slowly ends heating season

Starting Monday, six regions of Ukraine have been disconnected from central heating, marking the end of the heating season.

Following the onset of warm weather, consumers in the Kherson, Odesa, Mykolaiv, Dnipro, Volyn, and Vinnytsia regions no longer receive heating, Chairman of the Board of Naftogaz of Ukraine Oleksiy Chernyshov wrote on Facebook.

He expects that, after several days of cold weather forecast for this week, the heating season will gradually end in other regions of Ukraine.

Also read: Power Grids Repaired, Emergency Power Outages in Zhytomyr Region

"Ukraine is successfully completing the most difficult heating season. Weather conditions allow us to do this earlier than planned," Mr Chernyshov said, adding that Ukraine has "gone through the most difficult winter."

Back in August 2022, Ukraine’s Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal warned that Russia’s attacks on energy infrastructure might become the main risk during the 2022-2023 heating season.

Russia indeed started targeting Ukrainian power plants and other energy infrastructure with missiles in October 2022, which led to widespread rolling blackouts.

However, since Russians did not manage to destroy Ukraine's energy system, and the winter was warmer than normal, the heating season in Ukraine has been largely undisrupted.

In addition, the end of the heating season in Ukraine is accelerated by an expected sharp rise in gas prices from 1 April, when preferential gas prices for municipal and government institutions expire.