A worker walks through a burned-out control room at a power plant of energy provider DTEK, destroyed after an attack, in an undisclosed location in Ukraine on April 19, 2024. (Genya Savilov, AFP via Getty Images/TNS)
KYIV, Ukraine — As Ukraine scrambles to repair the damage that Russian missiles are inflicting on the country’s power stations, the weary population is facing what is shaping up to be one of the worst winters of the war so far.
Power outages are a given — because Ukraine’s energy system is already working at a deficit after receiving heavy blows from Russian strikes this year — but the estimates vary on just how bad it will be. The best-case scenario is just four hours of power cuts a day, but it could also end up being 20 hours of darkness or more a day in the depths of Ukraine’s frigid winter.
In his speech before the U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, was trying to break Ukrainians’ spirit by attacking the power infrastructure.
“This is how Putin is preparing for winter: hoping to torment millions of Ukrainians, ordinary families, women, children, ordinary towns, ordinary villages. Putin wants to leave them in the dark and cold this winter, forcing Ukraine to suffer and surrender,” he said.
The knock-on effects from extended power outages would be many — from cutoffs of water and heating, to delivering further blows to the country’s already limping economy. But the biggest victim of all could be Ukrainians’ already battered psyches. After some 2½ years of war, with little prospect of a complete victory on the horizon and a string of battlefield setbacks in recent months, people are reaching their limit.
The exhaustion of the population has direct military implications because many fighting units are heavily supported by civilian donations to purchase needed equipment — backing that is likely to fall off as people run out of resources.
“This winter we could be in deep, deep trouble,” a senior Ukrainian official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. As the winter progresses, people may grow “worn down, depressed and angry.”
Ultimately, this could affect public morale. “My biggest fear is that people go through this kind of winter, there will be zero way to find consensus among the population,” he said.
Public opinion surveys bear him out, said Anton Grushetsky, executive director of the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology. He described “a growing tiredness, and this causes more conflict, because people are more psychologically unstable.”
For the moment, with temperatures in the 70s, the public is giving little thought to what may lay ahead, Grushetsky said. He gave an example of his apartment building in Kyiv, where residents are struggling to collect money for an extra generator.
“At the moment, only a tiny share of apartments has given money, because a lot of people are thinking, ‘It’s quite nice weather right now, there are no electricity cutoffs — perhaps we will manage,’” he said.
But the frigid days and darkness will eventually come, and with this could come a shift in Ukrainians’ attitude toward the war. Grushetsky said the population is overwhelmingly against a peace with Russia “at any cost” — and most likely will remain so. But opinion polls indicate an increase in the number of people willing to make difficult compromises to bring the war to an end.
His surveys show readiness for territorial concessions among the population rising from just 10 percent in May 2023 to 32 percent one year later. That number rose to 57 percent if a potential deal included membership in NATO as well as leaving just the east and Crimea under Russian control.
Dissatisfaction with Ukraine’s Western partners could also grow if they do not provide the country with extra air defenses and continue to deny Kyiv forces permission to carry out deep strikes on Russian territory, said Victoria Voytsitska, a civil society leader and former parliament deputy.
“If we see that we’re not left alone and we’re given the tools to fight back on the battlefield, then here it will be painful but survivable,” she said, and people will keep up their spirits.
But if Western allies don’t provide Ukraine with needed weapons, “then it’s going to be a different story.” She pointed to a situation earlier in the year, when a $61 billion military aid package was blocked in the U.S. Congress, allowing Russian forces to advance in the east and pummel Ukrainian cities with missiles.
“We were promised, promised, promised … and there were delays, delays, delays,” she said. And because of the Russian missile attacks in the spring, “we lost nine gigawatts of power” — around half of Ukraine’s energy capacity.
Some of this loss is being restored. This year, Ukraine’s largest private energy company, DTEK, said some 90 percent of its coal-fired power plants had been damaged or destroyed. Today, the company is on track to repair 70 percent of these plants before the winter begins, CEO Maxim Timchenko said.
Ukraine’s allies are also mobilizing massive amounts of equipment to repair the electrical grid after Russian air attacks, with the European Union pledging nearly $300 million to bolster the energy sector.
“As Ukraine’s friends and partners, we must do all we can to keep the lights on,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said last week, announcing a “winter plan” for Ukraine that will contribute more than a quarter of its winter energy requirements,
This includes “a full thermal power plant that is being dismantled in Lithuania and shipped, piece by piece, to Ukraine,” she said. The E.U. is also planning to increase electricity exports to Ukraine.
Some of Ukraine’s electricity production will become less centralized with smaller equipment like gas turbines and renewables rather than the enormous plants currently used. Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said this month that more than 80 percent of Ukrainian schools and all hospitals had their own generators.
But the bulk of Ukraine’s energy production this winter will still be concentrated in large power plants, allowing Russia to inflict maximum damage with targeted missile strikes — as was demonstrated clearly last month when Moscow’s forces carried out one of the biggest bombardments since the war began.
Two days after Ukraine’s Aug. 24 Independence Day, Russia launched 127 missiles and 109 one-way drones, pummeling 15 regions and causing power outages throughout the country. Two nuclear power plants were also disconnected from the electrical grid because of safety concerns, Ukrainian officials said in a letter to the International Atomic Energy Agency last month.
Ukrainian officials are warning that the country’s nuclear power plants, which supply over half of the nation’s power needs, are being targeted — or at least the substations that connect them to the grid are being hit.
Russia is “preparing strikes on critical facilities” of Ukraine’s nuclear energy system “on the eve of winter,” Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha said in statement Saturday, citing Ukrainian intelligence reports.
The attacks will target “open distribution devices of nuclear power plants and transmission substations,” which created “a high risk of a nuclear incident that will have global consequences,” he said.
Last week, the U.N. Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine said there were “reasonable grounds to believe” Russia’s missile campaign against Ukraine’s energy system “violated foundational principles of international humanitarian law.”
“This winter will be bad enough with people likely having to cope with scheduled blackouts across the country,” Danielle Bell, head of the mission, said in a press release. “Any additional attacks leading to prolonged electricity blackouts could have catastrophic consequences.”
Ellen Francis in Brussels contributed to this report.
