Borys Todurov, head of medical services at the Kyiv Heart Institute, posted a video on Instagram that he said showed doctors wearing headlamps as they performed heart surgery on a child.
The operation had been underway on Wednesday when the power went out, Todurov said. The hospital had “no water for several hours,” he added.
The director of the Mechnikova Hospital in the central Dnipropetrovsk region said “tens of patients in a critical condition were on surgery tables” when the lights went out.
“Anaesthesiologists and surgeons put on headlights to save each of them,” Sergii Ryzhenko, one of the doctors, wrote on Facebook.
Ryzhenko posted a photo of two doctors he said were operating on a 23-year-old man.
“Doctors Yaroslav Medvedyk and Kseniya Denysova, along with their colleagues, were performing a unique surgery when the electricity went down. It happened for the first time in 35 years of Yaroslav’s practice. The nerves were tense, but the patient… has made it,” he said.
The Ukrainian health ministry said on Facebook: “The lack of light will not stop us.”
Electricity was restored to all parts of Ukraine’s power grid on Thursday, but individual households are being connected “gradually,” an official in the office of President Volodymr Zelenskyy said on Telegram.
“Electricity has been supplied to all regions of Ukraine,” Kyrylo Tymoshenko said.
“The first to be supplied were critical infrastructure facilities.
“As of now, household consumers are gradually being connected to the grid.”
The Ukrainian armed forces said 70 Russian missiles were launched on Wednesday afternoon and 51 shot down, along with five attack drones.
The attack killed at least 10 people, including a teenage girl, and “led to the temporary de-energisation of all nuclear power plants, and most thermal and hydroelectric power plants,” the Ministry of Energy said.
Zelenskyy requested an urgent meeting of the UN Security Council following the strikes, which met with swift condemnation from Ukraine’s allies.
In other news, the European Union announced it would prepare a ninth package of sanctions against Moscow, in what European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said was an attempt “to blunt even further its capacity to wage war on Ukraine.”
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s defence ministry sent a tweet on Thursday marking nine months since Russia’s February 24 invasion.
“Nine months. The amount of time in which a child is born. In nine months of its full-scale invasion, Russia has killed and injured hundreds of our children, kidnapped thousands of them, and made millions of children refugees,” it said.
Russia steps up missile strikes as Zelenskyy addresses world leaders