Russia has changed tactics in targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, using precision missiles to destroy power stations in areas less protected than Kyiv, some of which cannot be fully restored in time for next winter.
Ukrainian officials said that while not as widespread, the damage that Moscow had inflicted was worse than in the winter of 2022-23, with the apparent aim now being permanent, irreparable damage.
Russia targeted seven thermal power stations between March 22 and 29 — all in other regions than Kyiv, which has some of the best air defences in the country. The Russian missiles also hit two hydroelectric power stations.
Ukraine has not given details about the extent of the damage at each plant, but officials said several, including in the Kharkiv region near the Russian border, had been almost completely destroyed.
“Our goal is to restore as much as we can by October,” said Maxim Timchenko, chief executive of DTEK, Ukraine’s largest energy producer. The group lost about 80 per cent of its power generation in Russian attacks carried out in the last week of March. Five of DTEK’s thermal plants were forced to halt operations.
Timchenko said plans exist for some substations and larger power stations that were not wholly destroyed to be brought back online. “Subject to no further attacks, at least 50 per cent of damaged power units will be reconnected to the grid.”
Had it not been for the warm weather, energy imports from the EU and an increase in renewable energy generation, Ukraine would have experienced widespread blackouts, as it did in 2022-23, Timchenko said.
In the previous winter campaign targeting the Ukrainian energy grid, Russia sought to plunge cities into the dark and cold by targeting switchyards and transformers in attacks across the country, said Timchenko. But now Russian missiles are homing in on power plants in specific regions to “destroy them completely because it is not possible to rebuild power stations in a short time”.
“The same number of missiles used in the [2022-23] winter attack are now being directed at five to six energy facilities in one region,” said Maria Tsaturian, head of communications at Ukrenergo, Ukraine’s national transmission system operator.
“They are trying to cut off large industrial regions and cities from the power supply,” she said.
Smaller substations — managed by Ukrenergo — can be shielded from attacks with protective structures. But it is “very difficult, if not impossible” to cover large power plants, which take “several months or even years” to restore, she said.
The second, important difference with the winter of 2022-2023 is that Russia is now also using expensive precision ballistic missiles, said Andriy Gerus, head of Ukraine’s parliamentary committee for energy and utilities.
Gerus said that one recent attack on a coal power plant used $100mn worth of ballistic missiles — yet Ukraine has only a handful of US-made Patriot air defence systems capable of shooting them down.
Russia is still using drones in large numbers, however, but as a cheaper way to hit other parts of the energy system such as transformers, according Andriy Cherniak, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s military intelligence.
“We expected the attacks at the beginning of the winter but we now see that the missiles they have used are freshly made,” said Cherniak. He estimated Russia has enough missiles for one or two more big attacks in the coming weeks.
While the damage is said to be more permanent than in the winter of 2022-2023, it is more localised and the impact is being temporarily mitigated by a combination of large electricity imports from the European Union, domestic solar power stations and warm weather, said Gerus.
In the aftermath of the March strikes, imports from the EU reached a record 18,700MWh, the equivalent generated by two power plants, he said. In the months after Russia’s full-scale invasion of 2022, Ukraine connected its grid to neighbouring EU countries Romania, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland.
The sunny days of early spring have also helped, Gerus said. The current warm weather means that at midday, solar power is generating between 20-25 per cent of the country’s energy needs.
More renewable energy could help Ukraine even further in the long-run. Wind farms and solar stations are spread out, making it impossible for strikes to take out power generation in the same way, said Timchenko.
“All of us need to be thinking that after this winter, we’ll have another and another,” he said. “The solution for us is distributed generation.”
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