"There was a complete power outage in the Crimea. The emergency automatics in Krasnodar region went off. Active restoration of four power lines is underway. We are working to restore the energy supply of the peninsula as quickly as possible," Belik told reporters.
Later in the day, Sputnik correspondents reported that the power supply to Feodosia has been restored while residents in Yalta, Yevpatoria and Simferopol still have no electricity.
Black Sea Fleet spokesman Capt. 1st Rank Vyacheslav Trukhachev told Sputnik that the fleet switched to backup power and its combat readiness did not suffer.
The Russian Energy Ministry said that the incident took place due to abnormal heat.
Crimea was left without electricity in November, after Ukrainian nationalists blew up pylons that support electricity lines from Ukraine. Following the electricity blackout, Crimea declared a state of emergency and switched to locally-based emergency power generation.
Following the outage, Russia expedited the construction of underwater power lines from the Krasnodar territory across the Kerch Strait and connected Crimea to its power grid in December. Two branches came online on December 2 and 15, with two more, expected to make Crimea completely independent from Ukrainian power supplies, to begin operating later in the spring.
