How Russia’s scorched-earth attacks put Ukraine’s power grid near collapse.
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 1 hour ago
- 3 min read
By CONSTANT MÉHEUT
Brecht, then the head of operations at Ukrenergo, the national grid operator, had spent all winter trying to keep the country’s power system from collapsing under an assault from Russian forces unlike anything Ukraine had seen before.
In late January, he was walking through the debris-strewn substation site, directing repairs that would be crucial for Kyiv’s 3.5 million residents, when he was electrocuted and died, according to a former head of Ukrenergo, Volodymyr Kudrytskyi.
Brecht’s death is a stark measure of Ukraine’s fight to keep its energy system running during its coldest winter in a decade. From December to February, Ukraine endured 15 large-scale attacks on its energy facilities involving swarms of drones and missiles, more than three times the average number of attacks over the past three winters of war, according to data from Dixi Group, a Ukrainian energy research group.
Still, thanks to round-the-clock repairs and emergency deliveries of equipment from Western partners, Ukraine pulled its energy grid back from the brink of total breakdown. As temperatures rise and the strain on the grid eases, Ukrainians can now say they have survived their harshest winter at war and look back on weeks spent in dark and cold homes, sometimes without running water for days.
“It was infrastructure warfare designed to make civilian life fail and to trigger a humanitarian crisis,” said Vladyslav Mikhnych, director of the Kyiv Energy and Climate Lab, another research group. “Russia was deliberately testing how to freeze cities by striking the most sensitive links of urban systems at the worst possible moment.”
Earlier Russian campaigns to plunge Ukrainians into cold and darkness caused widespread damage. But they failed to bring down the grid because Moscow spread its strikes across the country, knocking no facilities completely out of service, said Mariia Tsaturian, an analyst at the energy research group Ukraine Facility Platform.
What changed this winter was both the weather — temperatures plunged well below freezing for weeks — and the tactics.
Energy experts say the Russian campaign followed a scorched-earth approach. Russia repeatedly struck the same facilities to obliterate them, targeting every link in the energy chain: power plants, substations transmitting electricity, gas pipelines and boiler houses.
Instead of attacking the grid broadly as it had done in previous years, Tsaturian said, Russia sought to break it into isolated pockets that could be crushed one by one. It targeted transmission lines to stop electricity from being redistributed between regions, then systematically battered power facilities within each cutoff zone.
On several occasions, Ukraine’s grid appeared close to collapse. On the last day of January, virtually all of Kyiv went dark for a few hours, according to data shared by DTEK, the country’s largest private energy company and the capital’s electricity distributor. That month, Kyiv residents spent half of every day without power on average.
Moscow began its energy infrastructure campaign in eastern Ukraine. The region’s grid is particularly vulnerable because it cannot draw power from the shuttered Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in southeastern Ukraine. The plant has been under Russian occupation since the war’s early days.
Eastern Ukraine has since become largely dependent on smaller power plants, and Russia bombed them relentlessly. Maksym Tymchenko, CEO of DTEK, which owns two thermal power plants in the eastern Dnipropetrovsk region, compared the situation to living in a “circle” of destruction and repair.