BY A STAFF REPORTER: Almost half a million homes in Kyiv are without electricity on Friday in the wake of Russian attacks on civilian infrastructure that have brought power outages across Ukraine, according to the capital's mayor Vitali Klitschko. “450,000 consumers, that is households in Kyiv, are out of power this morning. It is one and a half times more than the recent days,” Klitschko said. “Stabilization outages are applied due to overloading of the central unit of the country’s energy system. I urge all city residents to save electricity as much as possible because the situation remains difficult.”