Ukraine’s power grid is struggling under Russia’s blitz

If the aim of Vladimir Putin’s attacks on Ukraine’s energy system was to cripple the country’s will to fight, it did not seem to have worked

IT WAS THE fourth day without power in Vyshhorod, a town north of Kyiv, and in the reception area of the town hall dozens of locals sat around spaghetti-like piles of cables charging their phones, laptops and power banks. A massive Russian drone and missile attack on the night of December 26th-27th had knocked out electricity in much of the Kyiv region. In a by-now familiar routine, emergency generators had been rushed to Vyshhorod to keep public buildings and crucial infrastructure such as sewage pumps running.

A Russian air attack on Kyiv on Monday killed one civilian, Ukraine's military said on Monday.(AFP/Representative)

If the aim of Vladimir Putin’s attacks on Ukraine’s energy system was to cripple the country’s will to fight, it did not seem to have worked. “I wish Putin would die,” said Alla, an elegant pensioner in a fur hat, echoing the Christmas message of Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president. She was charging up a 15kg portable power station, a household battery referred to by locals as an EcoFlow, after the most popular brand, which she said could keep her home boiler going for about six hours. The worst part of the blackout, said Viktoriia, a 16-year-old reading a young-adult vampire novel, was not being able to use her hair-dryer.

Read more of our recent coverage of the Ukraine war

On December 28th, after meeting with Mr Zelensky in Florida and speaking with Mr Putin by phone, Donald Trump said the Russian president had been “very generous in his feeling towards Ukraine”, and wanted to supply it with “energy, electricity and other things at very low prices”. To Ukrainians who have been subjected this winter to an unprecedented assault on their electric grid, that sounded absurd.

“Russia has been hitting us harder than at any time since the full-scale invasion,” says Maxim Timchenko, the boss of DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private electricity supplier. Even with thousands of repair crews working flat out, he says, “the level of destruction is too great to recover everything. Our mission is to survive this winter.”

One of those crews was working on a substation at the outskirts of Vyshhorod that connects it to the adjacent Kyiv hydroelectric power plant. During the attack on December 26th-27th, says Igor Svystun, the town’s deputy mayor, about 100 drones and missiles were aimed at Vyshhorod, the majority targeting the power plant. Viktor Karpenko, an engineer, thinks a ballistic missile and possibly a drone were intercepted and exploded right above the substation, damaging everything below. This winter Russia has changed its tactics to target Ukraine’s 3,500 substations, rather than the power-generation plants, which are better defended. The Russian strikes are concentrating on big cities, such as Kyiv and Odessa.

Almost four years into the war, many Ukrainians have stockpiled power banks to cope with extended power cuts. But the four-day Vyshhorod blackout was exceptionally long. Since August, when the new wave of attacks on the energy system began, Kyiv has once again been forced to institute power cuts. But publishing a schedule for the cuts online usually lets residents plan for them.

About half of Ukrainians get their heat from gas-powered municipal heating systems. In tall apartment blocks electric pumps are required to force hot water to the top, so residents often club together to buy generators that can keep the heat on during blackouts. During extended outages older people may be trapped on higher floors, and need help for shopping. Individual home boilers need portable power stations to keep heating. Alla said she slept in her furs to stay warm after her power station cuts out. When an internet provider goes down, neighbours piggyback off each others’ WiFi if another provider is working.

Overall, the Russian campaign has been worryingly successful. When the full-scale invasion started in February 2022 Ukraine had 33.7 gigawatts of generating capacity, says Oleksandr Kharchenko, an energy consultant. Now it is down to about 14 gigawatts. The Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, which is occupied by Russia and no longer supplying power, used to provide six. If the next two months are very cold, Mr Kharchenko says, the country will need 17 gigawatts, three more than it can generate.

Although peace negotiations have intensified recently, there is no sense that they are heading towards an agreement in the near future. The American and Ukrainian positions appear closer than ever. At the meeting in Florida, Messrs Trump and Zelensky said they had converged on 90% to 95% of the issues. But the thorniest points remain; they concern what territory Ukraine might concede to Russia, and who will control the Zaporizhia nuclear plant. Mr Zelensky said he was happy with promises of American-backed security guarantees for Ukraine, though he wanted them to last longer than the proposed 15 years. Mr Trump appeared to walk back Ukrainian hopes, saying, “Nobody even knows what the security agreement is going to say.”

Mr Trump’s unpredictability and his credulousness towards Mr Putin leave Ukrainians sceptical. Russia has signalled that it finds the latest plan, based on a 20-point European-Ukrainian framework, wholly unacceptable. Mr Putin says he has no intention of halting his invasion, and he recently laid claim to the entire region of Zaporizhia. Mr Trump and his negotiators seem not to have absorbed these realities, and frenzied diplomacy looks set to continue during early January.

There has been more action on the Ukrainian political front. On January 2nd Mr Zelensky named as his new chief of staff Kyrylo Budanov, formerly the head of the HUR, the military intelligence agency. He replaces Andrii Yermak, a powerful but widely resented figure who left last month in a shake-up around a huge corruption scandal, though he has not himself been charged. Mikhailo Fedorov, a former digital minister and deputy prime minister, is to be the new defence minister. Messrs Budanov and Fedorov are both viewed as well-organised political operators with good connections in the West.

The power cuts have left Ukrainians tired and angry, says Yevhen Hlibovytsky, head of the Frontier Institute, a Ukrainian think-tank. But so far that has not translated into political demands for a change in government, despite the scandal, which related to kickbacks at the state-owned nuclear-power company. Electric grid operators are simply trying to keep the damaged grid running. DTEK has “teams across Europe searching for decommissioned parts like transformers that we can retrofit into our stations”, says Mr Timchenko. “It’s the fastest way we know to power [up] the country again.”