Alexander Nikulin was on a jury that in June sentenced to death two Britons, Aiden Aslin and Shaun Pinner, and a Moroccan, Brahim Saadoune, who were fighting on the Ukrainian side. The two Britons were arrested in Ukraine but returned home in September. “There was an attempt to use firearms on a judge of the Supreme Court of the Donetsk Republic, Alexander Nikulin,” the leader of the self-proclaimed republic’s rebels, Denis Pushilin, said on Telegram. It blamed Kyiv, saying the attack took place on Friday night in the town of Vuhlehirsk, in the eastern Donetsk region. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s state electricity company on Saturday announced a blackout in Kyiv and seven other regions of the country following Russia’s devastating strikes on energy infrastructure. The move comes as Russian forces continue to pound Ukrainian towns and villages with missiles and drones, damaging power plants, water supplies and other civilian targets, in a war nearing the end of nine months. Russia has denied that the drones it used in Ukraine came from Iran, but the Islamic Republic’s foreign minister on Saturday acknowledged for the first time that it supplied Moscow with a “limited number” of drones before the invasion. Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said, however, that Tehran did not know whether its drones were used against Ukraine and reaffirmed Iran’s commitment to ending the conflict. Ukrenergo, the sole operator of Ukraine’s high-voltage transmission lines, initially said in an online statement on Saturday that planned blackouts would take place in the capital and the greater Kyiv region, as well as in several areas around it – Chernihiv, Cherkasy , Zhytomyr, Sumy, Poltava and Kharkiv. Subscribe to This is Europe The most central stories and debates about Europeans – from identity to the economy to the environment Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertising and content sponsored by external parties. For more information, see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Later in the day, however, the company released an update saying that scheduled outages of a certain number of hours would not be enough and instead there would be emergency outages, which could last indefinitely. Ukraine has been struggling with power outages and water cuts since Russia began launching a barrage of missile and drone attacks on the country’s energy infrastructure last month. Moscow has said these came in response to what it claims were Ukrainian attacks in Crimea, the territory Russia illegally annexed in 2014. Ukraine has denied those claims.
