Engineers are now repairing Ukraine’s energy system faster than it can be destroyed
already a month into its campaign to bomb Ukraine’s energy infrastructure campaign when the man in charge of Ukraine’s power grid, Volodymyr Kudrytsky, saw a fleet of kamikaze drones headed towards his office. The attack on October 17th at Ukrenergo’s Kyiv headquarters sent many of his colleagues screaming and running for the shelters. Others stayed above ground to try to shoot down the drones. But Mr Kudrytsky headed off to move parked cars to safer spaces.
The darkest days came in late November. When the capital’s infrastructure was hit with a barrage of 67 missiles on the 23rd, the system began to switch off automatically to protect itself. For a few hours, Kyiv was completely without electricity, says Serhiy Kovalenko,of Yasno, the company that supplies energy to the capital. It wasn’t clear when the system would come back on again, or whether, indeed, the damaged grid could even support the necessary currents when it did.
and Buk, and a dwindling supply of missiles. When things were bad, it managed an interception rate of just 20%-30%. More recently, with the help of new mobile groups and Western air defence systems like, that figure is, Ukraine claims, regularly above 75%. Success on any particular day depends on a combination of factors: weather, the algorithms both sides use, and the missiles Russia fires.
All across Ukraine, energy maintenance teams have been going to work in flak jackets and helmets. The working conditions of some locations tests nerves to the maximum. Maxim Yatsenko, 25, is one of a team of engineers working in Nikopol, a mere 10km across the Dnipro river from Russian positions at the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant. Artillery barrages are still a daily event. “We’ve had shells landing 200m away, and flying over our heads. Sometimes, you are already too far into a job to stop.
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