Crumbs! Stricken Kiev blames Russian hackers for Xmas eve outages

Preference

Stricken Kiev?

I prefer Chicken Kiev!

Next: "Madame Nuland found crisp'd in shorted power line"

Seriously, Kiev?

For all we know, it might have been patriotic Nazis wanting to to get heard.

Possible most tenuous explanation

And not The Ten Uous (obscurest reference yet?).

FTA> A DDoS on a telephone system and malware on networks — especially if only corporate PCs are affected — don’t explain supply outages.

Phone trouble : if the controls are handled via modems then keeping the lines busy will stop the commands e.g. 'pedal faster' from going through.

Malware : if you plant enough malware on enough machines you can max out their CPUs, draw too much power, and if there's been a miscalculation on how thick the supply cable needs to be, then the cable will melt, sending molten copper down through the ceiling into the water tank below, solidifying and blocking the overflow, the tank overfills and the spillage goes through the next ceiling down and directly into the main control panel for the local traffic lights which then go wrong, causing a truck to crash into the nearest pylon, bringing down the main regional power cable.

There might even be some cool dramatic music to go with it.

Spetsnaz or squirrels?

Couldn't it be secret squirrels?

the Ukranian "war" is Russia's practice for Putin's intended war against Western Europe.

Ukraine is to Russia what the Spanish civil war was to Germany. Likewise his present airstrike involvement in Syria

You can expect Putin and his boys to test every new or novel technology they think they can get away with, just to see if it works.

The Ukrainian electrical system is pretty creaky to begin with. Combine several decades of being an economic basket case, under-investment, massive ongoing corruption, and now on top of it a civil war/"little green men", and just keeping the lights on at all is surprising. Outages during peak demand season? That should be pretty much a given.

The Russians may well be having a go at them, but so much of Ukraine's infrastructure is so outdated there may not actually be much that a "cyber" attack can actually do on the generating side. Of course they could get into the PC network in the business side, but that shouldn't be able to shut down the generating side. And yes, when the electric power goes out, customers do tend to flood the utility with calls of "the power is out" (like they didn't already know that), so that isn't unusual.

I could go into a lot of boring technical detail, but with generating plants and most of the coal mines on the other side of the front line, gas supplies from Russia for more plants terminated (by mutual disagreement/invective), and right wing militants blowing up the wrong power lines and cutting of parts of Ukraine as well as Crimea, this could be a cold, dark winter for a lot of unfortunate Ukrainians.