Satellite images reveal Crimea’s deepening energy crisis and risk of full-scale humanitarian disaster as Ukrainian strikes hit the peninsula’s power grid

Three months into Ukraine’s campaign to cut off Crimea’s energy supply, the annexed peninsula is on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe. Strikes by Ukraine’s armed forces initially disrupted fuel deliveries to the region; over time, they have increasingly left residents without electricity, water, or communications. The toll on the power grid is visible from space: we examined satellite imagery of Crimea at night to gauge the scale of the disaster. By late June, the peninsula’s overall nighttime illumination had already fallen to a fifth of its usual level. Now, following a strike on the Balaklava thermal power plant — which accounted for up to a third of the peninsula’s power generation — the region faces the prospect of a full-scale energy crisis. Here’s what else our investigation found.

How Crimea ended up in an energy crisis

In the spring of 2026, Ukraine’s armed forces began launching waves of medium-range drone strikes on occupied Crimea, hitting not only military facilities but also the peninsula’s civilian infrastructure. First came the fuel supply — trucks, storage depots, and tankers. Then the grid — power lines and substations.

By late May, an acute shortage had prompted the introduction of gasoline ration coupons in Crimea. Since mid-June, the annexed region has faced widespread power outages. Mykhailo Fedorov, now Ukraine’s former defense minister, called the strikes part of a strategic campaign to isolate Crimea and “turn the peninsula into an island.”

In some areas, the occupation authorities have been forced to switch to rolling blackouts on a three-hours-on, three-hours-off schedule; in others, the power has been out for a full day at a time. Sergei Aksyonov, the Russian-installed head of Crimea, acknowledged that some communities had gone without power for nearly two weeks.

Prolonged outages carry costs beyond minor disruptions like failed digital payments or spoiled refrigerator contents — they’re straining water supply, sewage, and mobile networks as well. Some cell towers have already switched to generator power, and social media groups are now crowdfunding bottled water for residents.

How we assessed the scale of the crisis

These reports alone don’t add up to a picture of the peninsula’s electricity supply. Russian-installed district heads post outage notices on social media, interspersed with word that the power is back. Nearly every community, and almost every street, runs on its own electricity schedule — and the schedules keep changing as strikes on substations mount.

To get a peninsula-wide picture, we worked with analysts at Vertical52 to examine satellite imagery of Crimea at night. NASA publishes the imagery through its VIIRS Black Marble program, which releases nightly views of Earth in visible and near-infrared light, recorded by instruments aboard the NOAA-20 and NOAA-21 weather satellites. Researchers use the images to study economic development and urbanization.

We used the data to work out which parts of Crimea the outages hit hardest, how far conditions had fallen from normal, and how the crisis has grown over the past several months.

VIIRS data has its own limitations, as do on-the-ground reports and every other source, and it requires careful interpretation:

• The imagery is recorded once a day, which gives a single moment and not the full sweep of a rolling outage schedule.
• Cloud cover sharply reduces the usable data, which makes day-to-day comparisons unreliable — for a single municipality or for the whole peninsula. The only way around this is to strip out cloudy pixels and average the data across days, which lowers the temporal resolution of the resulting charts.
• Nighttime illumination reflects electricity supply, but it does not correlate fully with power consumption, on which we have no data. Blackout measures in homes, for example, can dim the satellite view more than electricity consumption has actually fallen. For now, though, no strict blackout regime is in force in Crimea. The Russian-installed local authorities are cutting back on street lighting, but the goal is to save electricity, not to conceal the fact that homes still have power. The drop in street lighting is part of the crisis, not separate from it.

What we learned from satellite imagery of Crimea at night

The key takeaway, according to the data, is this: Crimea’s overall light levels plunged to one-fifth of normal by late June and have not rebounded since — and that’s before accounting for the strike on the Balaklava thermal power plant, discussed further below.

The satellite images above show illumination dropping sharply since April 2026, though the scale is hard to judge by eye.

On July 3, illumination across the peninsula was 83 percent below its April level — roughly one-sixth as bright. Roughly speaking, only one apartment in six had power that day. By July 8, the situation had improved slightly, with roughly one apartment in three lit, but it remained far from normal. Cloud cover has kept us from getting usable data for the past few days. We will rerun the analysis as soon as the data clears.

The peninsula’s small size, branching substation network, and centralized management let the Russian-installed authorities redirect available capacity in any direction, which means officials effectively decide who bears the brunt of the outages and who is spared. Mapping the imagery municipality by municipality shows how unevenly the burden fell.

Illumination in Sevastopol and Simferopol never fell below half of normal, even at the worst point. In Kerch and Saky, the outages ran long and cut deep: illumination fell to 20 percent of normal. The rural Bilohirsk district, which has one town and some 80 villages, all but vanished from the nighttime images.

Every municipality except Simferopol and Alushta was hit hard, and the center and the north of the peninsula suffered worst.

What will happen to Crimea’s electricity supply next

Although more than two dozen generating stations operate on the peninsula, Crimea’s power system effectively rests on three pillars: two gas-fired thermal plants, Balaklava and Tavriiska, with a combined capacity of around 940 megawatts; and the Kuban-Crimea undersea cable, through which the Krasnodar region can supply up to 400 megawatts more.

Smaller sources fill in around them: combined heat and power plants, wind turbines, and solar stations. The Vladyslavivka solar plant has a rated capacity of 110 megawatts, Okhotnikove 80, and Mykolaivka 70. Wind turbines operate in Saky, alongside a scattering of smaller sources.

Until mid-July, Ukrainian forces had hit substations on the peninsula but no power plants. By July 15, geolocation had confirmed at least 42 strikes on substations — from local 35-kilovolt units up to transmission substations rated at 330 kilovolts.

On July 14, Ukrainian forces struck the Balaklava thermal power plant (1, 2), which had accounted for up to a third of the peninsula’s power generation. What is known for certain is that the strike started a fire. Ukrainian forces said it damaged the turbine hall that houses the cooling system for one of the plant’s Siemens turbines. If so, repairs could take many weeks, leaving Crimea short not just of ways to move electricity but of electricity to move.

Ukrainian officials know from their experience of Russian strikes on their own country: strikes on distribution substations can cause severe outages. But with proper organization, substations can be repaired relatively quickly, so such crises do not last. Generating plants are another matter. The damage takes far more work to repair, and the outages last longer.

Crimea’s electricity crisis is severe enough to be visible from space — and now, with the Balaklava thermal power plant knocked offline, the peninsula could be headed toward a full-scale humanitarian disaster.