Russia has experienced an average of 34% more monthly power outages and electrical grid failures so far in 2025 than it did during the entirety of 2024, data collected by Novaya Gazeta Europe has shown.
Russia sees power outages rise by third as Ukraine scales up infrastructure airstrikes
Electricity pylons in Moscow, Russia, February 10, 2025. Photo: Yevgenia Novozhenina / Reuters / Scanpix / LETA
Russia has experienced an average of 34% more monthly power outages and electrical grid failures so far in 2025 than it did during the entirety of 2024, data collected by Novaya Gazeta Europe has shown.
From January to October 2025, 4,198 power outages were reported in Russia, a 12% increase on the 3,749 recorded during the whole of 2024, most of which were isolated cases. With two months still unaccounted for, the final figure for 2025 is still likely to rise significantly.
The leading cause of power outages, accounting for over 40% of cases, remains unspecified infrastructure damage with no official cause. Scheduled maintenance is responsible for 17%, while blackouts caused by extreme weather — both summer heat and winter cold — account for 15% of cases.
As Ukraine considerably scaled up attacks on Russian infrastructure targets in 2025, the share of drone-related power outages rose from 9% to 11%. A total of 467 drone-related power outages were reported by October, marking a 37% increase on the figures from 2024, though that number is bound to rise further by the end of the year.
The Ukraine-adjacent Belgorod region in western Russia saw the sharpest rise in drone-related power outages this year, jumping from 16 cases in August to 51 in October.
Power outages, which were often linked to infrastructure failures, peaked during the month of July in both 2024 and 2025. In cases in which a cause was specified, extreme heat was the most common explanation given. Russia’s southern Krasnodar region has experienced the most power outages in 2025 so far, with 71 reports of heat-related outages, followed by Dagestan in the North Caucasus; the Rostov and Volgograd regions in southern Russia, and the Kaluga region in western Russia.
Novaya Gazeta Europe collected all posts from 214 regional Telegram channels spanning 2021 to 2025 and used the Gemini 2.0 Flash language model API to identify those related to electricity-related incidents. Most posts concerned power outages, though some described accidents at substations or power lines without specifying whether outages occurred. In total, 18,167 relevant posts were identified, from which 15,345 unique incidents were extracted. For posts from 2024 and 2025, Novaya Europe also used a language model to determine the region where each incident occurred, based on the post content and the name of the channel. Additionally, each incident was categorised by likely outage cause. While blackout reports have increased, so has overall Telegram activity. Posts about outages rose from 1,510 in 2021 to 3,113 in 2023, though the total number of posts made on the channels being monitored also tripled during the same period, making it hard to separate real growth from increased reporting. Comparisons focus on 2024–2025, when posting volume stabilised.
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