Beyond its military, one of Ukraine’s fiercest defenders has been its power sector. Restoring destroyed plants, preventing blackouts, moving equipment across the country all while investing in new renewable capacity: Ukraine’s power sector is a masterful example of resilience from which Europe can and must learn.
Eurelectric sat down with DTEK – Ukraine’s largest private utility and biggest investor since the war began – to discuss their fight to keep the lights on.
Russia’s plan to plunge Ukraine into darkness
Russia’s strategy regarding Ukrainian critical power infrastructure has changed over the course of the war. According to DTEK CEO Maxim Timchenko, the real war started well before Russia’s full-scale invasion, with Russia’s annexation of Crimea and war in Donbass in 2014. DTEK first production assets were located in the Donbass region.
“We had to leave our hometown and lost significant parts of our asset base such as coal mines, power grid and power stations.”
Fast-forwarding to the past three years of war, we could describe Russia’s attack strategy as four distinct waves.
Wave 0: Cyber hits before physical attack
Before the invasion, DTEK registered an increasing amount of cyber attacks towards its critical power infrastructure with millions of attempted infiltrations, signalling a grander strategy in motion supported by a foreign state adversary. This laid the groundwork for invasion by taking critical energy infrastructure offline and sowing confusion.
“Since the start of the invasion we detected 300 million of cyberattack attempts but we successfully managed them thanks to our cooperation with Microsoft and others.”
Cybersecurity is set to remain a key concern for Ukraine, even when the war ends.
Wave 1: Physical attacks on the electricity grid
Two days before the full scale invasion, Russia shelled the Luhansk TPP thermal power station – the largest electricity producer in the Luhansk region – for 48 hours, together with transmission lines and substations. In the early hours of 24 February 2022, Russian forces crossed the border and began a march on Kyiv. Advances were preceded by grid disconnections. Their plan was to break the power grid into energy islands so that production areas in western Ukraine could not connect to the more consumption-heavy central and eastern regions.
Following the failed offensive on Kyiv, in the autumn of 2022, Russia began shelling transmission system substations, causing major blackouts all over the country. To restore power, Ukraine was initially split in energy islands disconnected from external power sources. Since then, internal cooperation and interconnection with the European grid has helped fully reconnect the country and taught DTEK how to avoid large-scale blackouts.
That’s when Russia moved to directly targeting centralised generation.
Wave 2: Shelling centralised thermal and hydro generation
2024 marked the lowest point of electricity capacity in Ukraine, with only 450 megawatts (MW) out of the 5000 megawatts (MW) usually supplied by DTEK.
Thermal hydropower plants became the preferred targets of Russian missiles. These plants were built when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union and were thus easy to locate for Russia via old Soviet maps. Such strikes deprived Ukraine of crucial flexible capacity.
“They managed to destroy 90% of our assets [but] they did not dare target nuclear plants which contribute to 50% of power generation” – recounted Burmistenko.
Since the time of this interview, however, recent developments are questioning whether nuclear assets are completely outside the scope of Russia’s attacks. This month, “a Russian drone, armed with a high-explosive warhead, struck the Chernobyl nuclear power plant on Friday” – reports Le Monde.
Despite this, DTEK has been able to restore around 70% of their capacity. The most effective way against missile strikes has been air defence, explains Burmistenko, but there is not enough capacity at the moment to handle the increasing physical missile attacks.
“Our power plants are currently cabriolets, they have no roof. It takes two missiles to destroy the whole roofs and they managed to do that for all our power plants” – adds Burmistenko.
DTEK is therefore working closely with local defence authorities and protection brigades to coordinate air defence.
Beyond internal cooperation, interconnection to Europe has also been pivotal for Ukraine to recover lost power capacity. At the end of October 2024, anticipating further Russian attacks on energy infrastructure, ENTSO-E agreed to increase cross-border capacity with Ukraine from 1.7 GW to 2.2 GW and up to 2.5 GW for emergency situations.
Ukraine was also aided by European neighbouring countries in the supply of equipment from dismantled power plants. Mobile Ukrainian brigades travelled overnight to compile a list of available components that were in shortage to bring them back to Ukraine and restore destroyed infrastructure.
While some power plants were reconstructed, DTEK also invested into new renewable capacity by launching new wind and solar projects. Renewables also ended up in Russia’s crosshairs.
Wave 3: Targeting decentralised renewables at last
As of June 2024, Russia started hitting renewables’ substations, solar PVs and wind turbines. However, this tactic seems more costly to Russia than to Ukraine.
“The cost of a Russian missile is around €5 million so it does not make economic sense to target a renewable asset which costs much less.”
It only took three to five days for DTEK to replace a damaged wind turbine or solar PV thanks to their abundant equipment stock. On the contrary, centralised power stations would take more than eight months to restore.
DTEK’s experience leads us to three key conclusions:
Decentralisation dilutes destruction
Renewables strengthen resilience during times of war.
“Our response to this war was to build new and better” – said Maxim Timchenko – “We built wind parks to replace coal power stations lost in Donbass and we invested heavily in renewable wind and solar.”
The starkest example of DTEK’s efforts has been the construction of the Tyligulska Wind Power Plant – the first wind park build in a war zone. This park is now a crucial source of power supply for Southern Ukraine.
Interconnection is indispensable
“Interconnectivity and partnership are something that keeps us alive” – stated Burmistenko.
One of the most important decisions for the future of Ukraine was grid synchronisation to the European network. This interconnection with the Bloc’s abundant and diverse energy system provides indispensable flexibility to the Ukrainian system when generation is taken offline. The possibility to increase cross-border capacity was made possible by this very synchronisation.
Furthermore, what seemed to be a project of many years was done in three weeks thanks to the strong commitment between Ukraine and the European Union in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion.
Energy and defence go hand in hand
Energy infrastructure is critical infrastructure and must be defended as such. Coordination with defence authorities proved crucial for DTEK to ensure air defence could shoot down missiles.
In anticipation of future cyberattacks, the defence community should collaborate further with companies like DTEK to foil attempts to take out critical infrastructure and improve cyber-resilience across the board.
Such lessons are especially timely for Europe today. The EU faces unprecedented changes in geopolitical relations, with US tariff threats and economic competition from China while having to manage a structural change in its energy system marked by the announced phase out of Russian fossil fuels. This calls for the EU to rethink its energy security strategy while allocating a key role for homegrown, clean electricity.
“It’s time to become energy independent.”