For months, Ukraine’s electricity grid has faced repeated Russian missile and drone attacks that have knocked out power plants and gutted substations. Now, it is contending with another, more unexpected threat: a sizzling heat wave.

Most of the country is experiencing unusually hot summer weather, with temperatures reaching 104 degrees Fahrenheit, or 40 degrees Celsius. It has strained an already hobbled grid, as residents turn on air-conditioners and food businesses use more electricity to cool products. Ukrenergo, the country’s national electricity operator, said Monday that current consumption largely exceeds Ukraine’s generating capacity.

To prevent a collapse of the grid, the authorities have imposed widespread rolling blackouts across the country. In Kyiv, the capital, most buildings are now without power for at least 10 hours a day, including during long periods in the daytime.

On Tuesday, Valerii Kalinichenko, a waiter at Shibuya Sushi Kiosk, a Japanese restaurant in central Kyiv, said his managers had bought a 15-kilowatt gas generator to provide power and keep their food fresh. “Power outages — we are ready for them,” he said.

The roar of generators installed by cafes and restaurants has become a soundtrack of the Ukrainian capital since the heat wave began last week.

With power out in the city, residents walk their dogs at night using glow sticks as collars on streets plunged into darkness. During the day, they flock to the banks of the Dnipro River that snakes through Kyiv, hoping to cool themselves off.

Energy experts say the current blackouts are a harbinger of what’s to come this winter. Recent Russian attacks have destroyed about half of Ukraine’s generating capacity, officials say, and there isn’t enough time to repair or rebuild many power plants before the winter.

Oleksandr Kharchenko, head of the Kyiv-based Energy Research Centre, estimated that power cuts in December and January will occur at more or less the same frequency and length as they are now, although other experts have warned of an even worse situation, with outages crippling sewage systems, for example.

Russia began attacking Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in the fall of 2022, targeting substations that distribute electricity. Ukraine managed to repair most of them, allowing it to get through last winter without significant disruption. At the start of this year, the country had about 18 gigawatts of generating capacity, enough to cover peak consumption in summer and winter.

But Russia’s latest campaign against the grid, which began in late March, has directly targeted power plants. Nearly all of Ukraine’s thermal power plants and a third of its hydroelectric power stations have been destroyed, President Volodymyr Zelensky said last month, bringing the country’s generating capacity down to nine gigawatts.

That is not enough to meet peak summer demand, which Mr. Kharchenko estimated at around 12 gigawatts. He added that the heat wave had increased consumption by 25 percent, leaving the government with little choice but to impose the blackouts.

Every day, Ukrainians consult online timetables of planned power cuts that mark outage hours with blue crossed-out lightning bolts and possible blackouts with gray bolts.

Ruslan Bakumov, an unemployed resident of Kyiv, said on Tuesday that power outages had become the new normal at his home, causing food in his fridge to rot. He now spends most days sunbathing at a beach beside the Dnipro River.

Around him, hundreds of people, young and old, were enjoying an afternoon on the beach in sweltering temperatures. It looked like an oasis of peace in a city that only last week was hit by one of the deadliest Russian air assaults of the war, killing more than 30 people.

The Ukrainian authorities have been exploring various solutions to try to restore as much generating capacity as possible before winter sets in. They are negotiating with the European Union to remove bottlenecks that limit Ukraine’s electricity import capacity to 1.7 gigawatts; and have pressed Western allies to provide spare parts from decommissioned power plants.

DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private electricity company, has published a list of all the equipment it urgently needs, such as autotransformers, worth a total of $230 million. But officials and experts acknowledge that the repaired power stations could be hit again by Russian missiles before winter, rendering the effort pointless.

Ukrainian officials have also floated the idea of installing hundreds of small gas turbines across the country, which would have the added benefit of dispersing the energy infrastructure, making it harder for Russia to target. Roman Vybranovskyy, the co-founder of the Ukraine Facility Platform, a think tank, said the “idea is great on paper, but hard in reality.”

Connecting gas turbines to communities requires equipment that is not easily available, he said, noting that some recently-installed turbines were not working. “Turbines are not a plug-and-play solution.”

The Ukrainian government has said that power cuts will ease next month, when nuclear power plants currently under repair will be back in operation.

On the riverside beach in Kyiv, several sunbathers were skeptical the situation would improve given Russia’s punishing pace of airstrikes on power plants. “Hope for the best, expect the worst,” said Oleksandr Kravchenko, 37. “Only God knows what will happen.”

Daria Mitiuk contributed reporting.

The Thai police said on Wednesday that they had found traces of cyanide on flasks and teacups in a Bangkok hotel room where six bodies were found the previous day, and that one of the people found dead was believed to have administered the poison.

Maj. Gen. Noppasin Poonsawat, the deputy police chief in Bangkok, told reporters that one of the six people “did this by using cyanide.” He did not identify the person. General Noppasin said the group had gathered in Bangkok to discuss an investment plan in which several of them were involved.

The bodies were found on Tuesday in a hotel room at the Grand Hyatt Erawan in the heart of downtown Bangkok, and little was immediately revealed about how they had died. The case has shocked Thailand, and officials have rushed to offer assurances that the country, one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations, remains safe.

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A “hostage,” a search for explosives, heaps of royal jewels and a five-foot silver gilt mace. Welcome to the reopening of Britain’s Parliament, replete with ancient traditions and elaborate rituals, and infused with anticipation over the country’s newly elected Labour government.

The restart of parliamentary business on Wednesday will begin with a speech by King Charles III, a significant ceremonial duty that sets out the government’s agenda. While it’s not the first time King Charles has presided over the ceremony — he delivered his first King’s Speech last November, and he delivered the Queen’s Speech on behalf of his mother, Elizabeth II, in 2022 — it is the first time his speech will herald a new party’s time in power.

Despite the name, the speech is not written by the king, but by government officials. The monarch just reads it out.

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The village, according to the retired teacher in northern Moldova, was a placid place until the local priest, disoriented by the war in Ukraine, succumbed to Satan, she said. Before that, people got on well and attended Sunday services at the same Russian Orthodox Church.

Now, said Tamara Gheorghies, the teacher, “they don’t even say hello to each other.” The reason, at least in her telling, is simple: a decision by the village priest to sever his allegiance to Patriarch Kirill in Moscow, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church.

The Moscow Patriarch has for decades commanded the loyalty of Orthodox Christians across the former Soviet Union. But in March, the village priest joined a rival ecclesiastical hierarchy based in neighboring Romania, a member of the European Union.

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