The Assault on Ukraine’s Power Grid

The bombardment has been relentless. From the beginning of October through the middle of January, Ukraine’s intelligence service documented two hundred and fifty-six drone and missile strikes on energy facilities: eleven on hydroelectric power plants, ninety-four on thermal power plants, and a hundred and fifty-one on substations. “There is not a single power plant in Ukraine that the enemy has not attacked,” the country’s energy minister, Denys Shmyhal, told lawmakers in Kyiv on January 16th. “Thousands of megawatts of generation have been knocked out.” In a sign of how dire the situation has become, Shmyhal called on businesses to turn off their outdoor advertising. “If you have excess electricity, give it to people,” he said.

At the power plant I visited, repair crews were working twenty-four hours a day to get whatever they could back up and running. There was only so much they could do. With stocks of spare parts running low domestically, Orest said that former Eastern Bloc countries, such as the Czech Republic and Bulgaria, were the most obvious places to turn for help. “Many of their power plants are almost identical to ours,” he said. Still, other equipment that was damaged in the latest attack will need to be built to exact specifications, a process that can take months, even in normal times. Meanwhile, Orest just hoped that the plant wouldn’t sustain any more damage. “But we must always be prepared,” he said. “I don’t see any signs that the attacks will stop.”

Russia began targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in the first year of the war. Back then, the attacks were sporadic and spread out. This winter, they’ve been concentrated on major cities, such as Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, and Dnipro—and punishing in scale and frequency. A single barrage can include dozens of missiles and hundreds of drones, overwhelming Ukraine’s already beleaguered air defenses. At a recent press conference, Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, disclosed that several air-defense systems had just been replenished after running out of missiles—for how long, he didn’t say.

The attacks have plunged large swaths of the country into prolonged blackouts. (DTEK alone has lost more than two-thirds of its generation capacity.) Many of the blackouts are announced ahead of time, though not all. Lviv, a city of more than seven hundred thousand people, situated some forty-five miles east of the border with Poland, has been spared the worst of it. The longest stretch of time that my apartment has been without electricity is eight hours. Inconvenient, yes, but far from unbearable. I’ve given up on storing anything in my freezer, and I make sure to check the outage schedule, which is posted online every morning, before I throw in a load of laundry. When the power is out in the evening, I cook dinner and read by the light of a headlamp. I’ll often go to bed early, falling asleep to the low hum of an eighteen-kilowatt diesel generator that powers a convenience store across the street.

In parts of Kyiv, by contrast, outages have lasted weeks. Hot showers are a luxury in much of the city, elevators are best avoided, and frozen pipes have become a widespread flooding hazard. Schools extended winter vacation to the end of January out of concern that the heating and electricity shortages made the buildings unsafe for students. It’s often not much better at home; to ward off the cold, people have taken to warming bricks on their gas stoves and huddling in tents pitched in their living rooms. “The Russians are weaponizing winter,” Daria Badior, a Ukrainian journalist and cultural critic who splits her time between Lviv and Kyiv, told me. “They want Kyiv to suffer.” On January 24th, a huge strike knocked out heating to nearly half of the city’s twelve thousand apartment buildings. In Troieshchyna, a densely-populated neighborhood on the eastern bank of the Dnipro River, about six hundred apartment buildings also lost electricity and water. Emergency-response teams quickly erected two tent camps in the neighborhood, giving local residents a place to warm up and charge their phones. On Tuesday, Russia launched another sweeping barrage, hitting power plants in at least six regions of Ukraine and thumbing its nose at President Donald Trump, who had just called for a pause in such attacks. In some areas of Kyiv, where more than eleven hundred apartment buildings were left without heat, temperatures fell to minus thirteen degrees Fahrenheit.