With constant assaults on the electricity grid, Moscow is adding an explosive twist to an old playbook.
Russia’s renewed and much broader assault on Ukraine’s energy sector this spring, which has now destroyed roughly half of the country’s electricity generation capacity, represents an explosive blow to Kyiv’s resilience, civilian morale, and industrial production. What’s worse, the ongoing Russian attacks on the vulnerable energy system offer few prospects of a quick fix that could right the situation before Ukraine enters its third winter of the war.
Since early this year, Russia has set out to finish the job it failed to complete in early 2023—the destruction of Ukraine’s civilian energy sector, especially the power plants that provide light and heat for millions of Ukrainians.
Beginning in March, Russia has specifically targeted Ukraine’s biggest power plants in six massive waves of missile and drone strikes, wiping out about 9 gigawatts of electricity generation, or half the country’s total. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told a reconstruction conference in Berlin on Tuesday that Russian strikes have wiped out 80 percent of Ukraine’s big coal- and gas-fired power plants and one-third of its hydroelectric facilities.
Especially as a result of the last two big attacks, in early May and early June, Ukraine has had to ration electricity for industrial and residential consumers, leaving many with power for only short periods of time; some cities, such as Kharkiv, on the country’s eastern front line are virtually powerless. Russia’s assaults, which the U.K. ambassador to the United Nations has argued are in part an attempt to terrorize civilians, are even a subject for the U.N. Security Council.
As bad as Russia’s attacks have been so far, they could get worse. Russia has already hit some of Ukraine’s natural gas storage facilities—underground bunkers that are used to store fuel both for domestic needs and to backstop European consumption. Further Russian strikes there could expand the pain of energy attacks beyond Ukraine’s borders, right at a time when Europe is scrambling to find a solution for gas transit flows across Ukraine into landlocked Eastern European countries, especially Austria.
The other big worry is that Russia, after having already destroyed Ukraine’s main sources of baseload power generation, will finally knock its remaining three nuclear power plants off the grid. (Russia has since the early days of the war occupied Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station, using it as a shield for its occupation of south-central Ukraine, but the station—Europe’s largest nuclear facility—is in shutdown and not generating power.)
“It sounds mad to attack the nuclear power stations, but Russia could hit the transformers near the nuclear plants. If they did this, the power system will lose its unity, and the country will be split into different energy islands, some with spotty power and some entirely without,” said Andrian Prokip, an energy expert at the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute in Kyiv.
The undeniable success of this year’s Russian assault is a sharp contrast to its ultimately failed bid in the first winter of the war to freeze Ukraine into submission. Russia has thrown more ordnance at more vulnerable targets this time around, leading to longer-lasting damage that will be far costlier to repair. Only after the big strikes in early May did Ukraine have to start rationing power to residential and industrial consumers. There is concern among big industry, such as the country’s once-vaunted steel and iron industry, that the power outages could kneecap what appeared to be a miraculous wartime recovery of industrial output.
“The difference is that before they mainly targeted transmission lines and substations and now they are destroying power generation plants,” said Slawomir Matuszak, a Ukraine specialist at the Centre for Eastern Studies in Warsaw. “The previous attacks were relatively easy to recover from—a question of days or weeks. But you’re looking at one to two years now for a real rebuild, if that even makes sense, because they can simply be attacked again.”
For Ukraine’s leaders, the renewed Russian strikes pose a threat to the country’s already strained ability to sustain years of unremitting bombing assaults, social and economic disruption, and the increased mobilization of service members. The new campaign has redoubled Ukraine’s desperation to bolster its air defenses in order to protect what’s left of its energy system.
“Russia’s goal hasn’t changed—they seek to destroy our energy system and use it as a weapon against our citizens,” said Kira Rudik, a Ukrainian parliamentarian who leads the pro-European party Holos and who described the constant disruptions to daily life from the power outages that come atop Russia’s ceaseless use of stand-off weapons to batter civilian residences across the country, including her own. (Zelensky said Tuesday that Russia had launched 135 glide bombs in just the last day.)
“So we are saying, get us the F-16s, get us the Mirages, get us to this luxury point where we can go to bed and know that we will wake up in the morning,” Rudik said, referring to U.S.- and French-made fighter jets. “In Ukraine, we do not have this luxury.”
The increased pace of Russian attacks on Ukraine’s infrastructure has also injected fresh urgency into the question of how and when to leverage Moscow’s frozen assets for Ukraine’s assistance. U.S. and European leaders are working on a plan to turn the proceeds of frozen Russian cash into a large loan for Ukraine. For those on the receiving end of Russian attacks, even discussions such as those at the reconstruction conference in Berlin seem too focused on rebuilding Ukraine after the war, rather than reinforcing Ukrainians’ will to resist now.
“We need the money now,” Rudik said. “We have a simple task before us: to survive the summer and get through the winter somehow.”
Some Western countries are heeding Ukraine’s pleas for more air defense, which could help protect both cities and critical infrastructure from Russian attacks, especially after the devastation unleashed in the May and June strikes. Germany is now mulling the dispatch of a fourth Patriot air defense battery, with Chancellor Olaf Scholz urging allies to do more; Italy is preparing to send more air defense systems of its own, while even recalcitrant countries such as Spain are sending more air defense ammunition. Late last week, the Biden administration included more air defense missiles in its latest aid package for Ukraine.
Getting more air defense is a necessary but hardly sufficient condition to begin rebuilding Ukraine’s battered electricity sector. Even at big plants that had an air defense umbrella, such as Kyiv’s critical Trypilla generating station, Ukrainian forces simply ran out of ammo under Russia’s big assault in April; the plant was demolished. But even with better air defenses, energy experts doubt more than 2 to 3 gigawatts of power generation capacity could be rebuilt before winter. That would still leave a big shortfall in power generation, not to mention the ongoing damage to combined heat-and-power plants that provide central heating during Ukraine’s brutal winters.
One short-term, but expensive, fix would be to rely on more electricity imports from Europe. Just before this year’s Russian assault began, Ukraine was actually exporting excess electricity production to Europe—but that was soon reversed. Today, Ukraine can import about 1.7 gigawatts of electricity from Europe and in a pinch can even get more than 2 gigawatts of power. The problem is that imported electricity is more expensive than the subsidized power Ukraine generated at home, exacerbating the country’s already strained finances.
The other solution, long broached in Ukraine, is to build more small, decentralized power plants, including small gas-fired turbines and renewable sources such as solar and wind power. The push for more renewables has actually increased during the war, and especially in the wake of this spring’s Russian onslaught, as Ukraine seeks new sources of power generation.
On Tuesday, members of the G-7+ Energy Coordination Group and Ukraine’s government outlined plans to make the electricity sector more resilient, including through more distributed generation. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said Tuesday at the Berlin conference that Brussels is raising money for urgent power sector repairs as well as a host of small-scale generators. “The aim is to help decentralize the power system and thus increase resilience,” she said.
The biggest advantage of replacing hulking, centralized power plants with a lot of smaller, widely scattered sources of power is that they are a lot harder to blow up with scarce Russian missiles.
“If you have sources of microgeneration, and lots of them, then Russia will not have enough missiles to hit all of them, even if they knew where they were,” Prokip said. “So distributed generation is the right way to go, but the government didn’t take enough steps to do this when it could.”
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