Kyiv
CNN
—
Katerina Serdyan said the only way to survive Ukraine’s near-daily schedule of power outages is to “always have a Plan B.”
The 35-year-old has had to adapt to life in a high-rise apartment in Kiev with her active three-year-old daughter, Varya.
On days like that, when she has to carry her now 17kg child up 15 flights of stairs to go play, she jokes, she often picks up a ball instead of her bike.
Without electricity there is no water, so parents have to adjust their children’s bath times to accommodate power outages, but sometimes their children take baths outside of the scheduled times.
Wanting to provide a hot meal every day to her toddler, who normally won’t eat, she now has a camping gas stove and a small battery to power the microwave in her kitchen.
Serjan’s resilience masks the deepening crisis in Ukraine. While this is not the first rolling blackout since Russia’s full-scale invasion, it is the first to occur in the spring and early summer – the months when electricity demand is traditionally lowest, before the air conditioning season begins – and highlights the scale of the supply problems.
Early Thursday morning, Ukraine suffered its seventh major Russian attack on energy facilities since March 22 of this year. State grid operator Ukrenergo reported damage in four regions. Seven energy workers were injured and planned power outages were extended.
A “massive” Russian missile attack struck several energy facilities in Ukraine on Saturday, leaving thousands without power, officials said.
Two power engineers were injured and energy facilities were damaged overnight in Zaporizhia Oblast, according to Zaporizhia Oblast military governor Ivan Fedorov.
Ukraine’s energy grid has been targeted by Russian missiles since the war began, but this year Moscow has begun to specifically target power generation facilities — thermal power plants, hydroelectric plants and even energy storage facilities. It’s a big change in tactics from last winter, when attacks were less accurate and damage easier to repair. Experts say Russia is using better weapons and taking advantage of thin Ukrainian air defenses.
Speaking at the Ukraine Recovery Conference in Berlin in mid-June, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy revealed the extent of the damage caused by the first six attacks: “Russian missile and drone attacks have already destroyed 9 GW of electricity, while Ukraine’s peak electricity consumption last winter was 18 GW. That means half of that is no longer there,” he said.
Officials and energy executives acknowledge there’s no way to avoid blackouts this winter. The challenge now is just to minimize them.
“If we don’t restore existing damaged power plants, improve incoming interconnection capacity, and build these distributed generators at least in some places, people will have less than four hours of electricity per day,” said Dmytro Sakhaluk, executive director of Ukraine’s largest private energy company, DTEK.
“There are 120 days until the heating season starts,” he warns. “We can’t continue with business as usual.”
Thomas Peter/Reuters
People stand at a fast food stall in Kiev during a partial power outage.
Jan Dobronosov/Global Images Ukraine/Getty Images
Power outages have become a part of life in Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion, but now occur throughout the spring and early summer.
Ukraine is tackling the problem in a variety of ways: Authorities and energy companies are rebuilding what they can, including using parts from decommissioned European power plants, trying to secure as many generators and gas turbines as possible to support critical infrastructure through the winter, and working with European partners to increase electricity imports.
Before Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, Ukraine was a net exporter of electricity and even managed to resume some exports during the war, but that stopped in March.
“We are doing our best,” Deputy Energy Minister Svitlana Grinchuk told CNN. “We understand that it will be very difficult to survive without energy.”
If supply-side efforts are insufficient, all that’s left is to reduce demand, which means asking Ukrainians, already tired of blackouts, to make further sacrifices. “We asked our people to understand the situation, to be ready to support Ukraine, to support energy workers,” Grynchuk said. “We call this the second frontline: energy.”
In late April, weeks after Russian attacks destroyed the Kyiv region’s largest power plant, Andriy Buzovsky, a 52-year-old Kyiv police officer, spent about $1,400 to install two solar panels on the balcony of his home.
“I installed it so my family wouldn’t have to worry if they lost electricity,” he told CNN. “I don’t know what’s going to happen next.”
Governments want to go further: Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmykhal just announced new subsidies to help housing cooperatives invest in solar panels and heat pumps, and Ukraine’s central bank is also working to make it more affordable for households and businesses to borrow money to buy energy equipment.
Serjan, who lives in a high-rise apartment in Kiev, is seeking energy independence in a different way: She is so worried about enduring the freezing temperatures in her apartment this winter that she is considering renting a smaller house with a wood-burning stove on the outskirts of Kiev.
“It feels so 19th century,” she admits.
Airlines are also doing their part. Ukrainian Railways has changed schedules for 74 commuter trains (about 7% of the total) and suspended some services. The company told CNN it has also turned off air conditioning in its administration building and switched off outdoor lights.
Anatoly Stepanov/AFP/Getty Images
Government responds to Russian aggression by encouraging solar power.
Valentin Ogilenko/Reuters
A thermal power plant that sustained heavy damage in the Russian attack.
Marta Torshi, CEO of supermarket chain Ocean Ukraine, told CNN that all of its stores already have generators, but that it has modernized refrigerators and reduced its stock of short-life products to save energy, in part with the added motivation of mitigating rising costs.
“Running our entire network on diesel generators is about three times more expensive than running it from a central grid,” Trash said, “so we are reducing lighting and temporarily restricting access to fridges to conserve power in our sales areas, but we understand how customers are perceiving this enforcement action.”
Power outages would obviously lead to inflation, said Igor Pidubny, a researcher at the Kyiv University of Economics. “Companies have to find some way to get backup power, so they’re buying things like diesel generators and solar panels, which leads to higher production costs,” he told CNN. Ukraine’s inability to export electricity would also disrupt its trade balance, leading to inflation, he said.
The National Bank of Ukraine projected in May that economic growth would slow to 3% this year from 5.3% in 2023, mainly due to the hit to the energy sector. Inflation is expected to rise slightly to 8.2%.
While unemployment in Russia is at a record low due to a wartime labor boom, Pidubny said there was evidence the blackout was forcing Ukrainian companies to lay off staff.The central bank expects the unemployment rate to fall again this year, but only to 14 percent from the current 15 percent.
It’s a painful situation, Pidubny said. “Ukraine is really suffering big losses, but the problem is that Russia still makes a huge profit from oil and gas exports.”
The Kyiv University of Economics estimated last month that rebuilding Ukraine’s damaged energy infrastructure would cost $50.5 billion, including new measures to make it more resilient to further attacks. That’s the full amount of hard-won loans Ukraine recently pledged using interests in frozen Russian assets as collateral, but the money may not arrive for months. The G7 has already spent $3 billion to support Ukraine’s energy sector, and only announced another $1 billion in funding in early June.
Pidubny also said it was impossible to calculate the true cost of rebuilding as long as the attacks continued. “It’s obviously uncertain how many more power plants will be destroyed by Russian forces,” he said.
Ukraine’s energy ministry says it is building concrete shelters to protect some energy facilities from attack, but only a more advanced air defense system could protect the entire plant and prevent skyrocketing rebuild costs.
In the wake of Thursday’s attack, Kiev’s intensive lobbying finally appeared to be paying off: After months of talks, Romania agreed to send Patriot air defense systems to Ukraine, and a senior White House official told CNN that the US is giving Ukraine top priority for advanced air defense capabilities, ahead of other countries. The deliveries are expected to begin this summer.
Speaking to CNN before the seventh wave of attacks on energy facilities on June 20, Saharuk said he wanted air defense weapons deployed to protect the energy facilities.
He acknowledges that maintaining employee morale is a big challenge: “They realize that they’re caught in a kind of cycle where they fix an energy facility, then they find out Russia is fixing it, and then they destroy it again.”
“In some cases, workers have already done this three or four times.”
CNN’s Claire Sebastian reported from London and Olga Voitovich reported from Kiev. Svitlana Vlasova, Daria Tarasova-Markina and Maria Kostenko contributed to this report.
