THE SUN beats down on the utilities repair crew in Bereznyaky, a prefab-concrete suburb on Kyiv’s left bank. Winter-proofing the electricity grid is slow work, digging out hundreds of metres of Soviet-laid cable and replacing it with thicker lines able to withstand an emergency surge. But foreman Roman Kravchenko is cutting no corners; he knows what failure feels like. Last winter, after Russian missiles destroyed the local heating plant, residents switched to electric home heaters that burnt out the network. Hundreds of apartment blocks had no heat or power for weeks. At one point, an angry crowd penned in Mr Kravchenko’s crew.
“They said they wouldn’t let us go until there was light,” he recalls.
From April, the government and energy companies began implementing a resilience plan. It has four priorities: enough local generation capacity to power critical infrastructure inside each major city; physical protection of crucial elements; decentralised heating; and a decentralised supply of electricity. A separate programme covers reserve water supplies. The State Restoration Agency has been particularly nimble. Its work matters most in Kyiv, where city authorities had lagged behind those in other cities, such as Kharkiv. Working round the clock, the agency has now shielded two dozen of them with netting and concrete reinforcements, while also fortifying power plants. The picture in the air is much darker. Projects to build homemade ballistic interceptors are unlikely to deliver for years. Ukraine hopes to blunt the threat by hitting launchers and production facilities inside Russia, and has had some success. Yet Russia’s campaign this year will almost certainly be more destructive than last. The capital’s massive thermal power stations are too large to protect fully. “A concentrated ballistic strike can destroy any one of our power plants. His repair crew in Bereznyaky, filling in their trench, has reached much the same conclusion.
Before this year not one of the capital’s 110-kilovolt transformers, which help step down current from high-tension lines to households, had been protected. Russia has stepped up its production of ballistic missiles—now roughly 100 a month—just as supplies of interceptors have tumbled. Ukraine is trying to get an additional 300 Patriot missiles from partners this winter, but there is no guarantee.
Because of better management by the new energy minister, Denys Shmyhal, a former prime minister, the strategy is producing results, partly.
“By December we will have done three times more than in any year before,” says Oleksandr Kharchenko, an energy expert. Serhiy Sukhomlyn, its director, says the new defences should withstand anything short of a direct missile hit. “Strikes have set monthly records for the last four months,” says Maxim Timchenko, CEO of DTEK, the company that runs Kyiv’s grid. One senior government official sees no reason why this winter would be better than the last; the capital will be “tormented” once the frosts arrive. “We’ll have done our work, that’s all we can do,” says Mr Kravchenko. “Now it’s down to the guys in air defence.”
Even before the last winter was over, Ukraine’s security council resolved not to let it happen again. Mr Timchenko is more measured, but concedes that no one can guarantee that last year’s problems will not be repeated.
A source in Ukraine’s air defence command says that in recent attacks that combination shot down only 30% of the jet-powered drones. The unit cost for these drones has fallen by half or more to around $50,000-70,000, and will decrease further. For now, Russia’s main focus is probably on 140 or so substations run by Ukrenergo, the state electricity company, which convert high-voltage electricity to lower voltages for use on local networks. Fully 2,500 of the capital’s 15,000 buildings have no back-up heat source.
Then there are the jet-powered drones, launched by the hundreds in recent attacks. Because of depressed industrial demand, ukraine may have more power than it needs through the winter, if only. Ukraine had largely neutralised propeller-driven Shahed-type kamikaze drones, shooting down more than nine of every incoming ten. The new pilot-guided jet models fly much quicker, at up to 600km/h rather than 200km/h. The shift was long expected, but Ukraine has not yet deployed a cost-effective countermeasure. It is testing several new interceptors; most resemble miniature missiles. For now, the only effective defence comes from expensive fighter jets, shoulder-mounted air-defence missiles or automated anti-aircraft guns at key targets. More troubling, the drones were able to hit high-value assets that ballistic missiles had missed for four years. The problem is likely to get worse. Defying Western forecasts, Russia appears to have found a way to produce the jet engines at scale. The bigger problem will be getting power to vulnerable cities such as Kyiv, Odessa and Kryvyi Rih, if Russia destroys their local generating capacity. The capital is particularly exposed. Some substations around Kyiv lack backups. So do the city’s connections to nuclear plants, which provide most of its electricity. Power for the water system is vulnerable, too. Without it, sewage and central heating services will fail.
The air-defence source says the Kremlin has managed to circumvent sanctions to obtain 3D-printing machinery for turbines, comparable to the kind in Western Rolls-Royce factories. “Ukraine failed to properly prepare for the threat,” the source says, “but the failure is on our partners too.
