Ukraine’s energy operator Ukrenergo said Monday it would be conducting emergency shutdowns in the Kyiv area following the latest Russian drone attacks. Russia has repeatedly used the drones to attack Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, often targeting critical infrastructure such as power and water facilities. Last week, VOA Eastern Europe Bureau Chief Myroslava Gongadze spoke with Ukrenergo CEO Volodymyr Kudrytskyi about recent developments. Officials say at least $1.5 billion is needed for only the superficial quick restoration of Ukrainian energy facilities destroyed by Russian strikes.
Tell me where we are right now. What is going on in this station?
Oh, this is an ultra-high voltage substation, which is very important for southern and western region of Ukraine. We are operating, as you know, power system of Ukraine, and it comprises power stations or power plants and transmission lines and substations. The substations are one of the critical elements of the power grid, and they transform voltage from higher to lower level to distribute the power to end consumers.
And the heart of the substation is the transformer, which actually performs this function — to transform voltage from one place to another. And substation could be like 10, 15, 20, 40 plus hectares. So it's a large object and very important for the whole region, for millions of people who are powered from this object.
It looks like Russian main objective for this winter is to destroy electrical infrastructure of Ukraine. How much is Ukraine suffering right now, and how do you see the things going ahead with this?
Well, first of all, I would like to say that Russia’s already launched more than 1,000 heavy missiles and kamikaze drones, specifically at Ukrainian electric grid. Mostly Ukrenergo objects, transmission objects, but also power plants. And this makes this campaign against power system the largest in human history. Nobody ever has experienced what we are experiencing now.
So, of course, such a scale of destruction presumes a lot of problems. And unfortunately millions of Ukrainians are now suffering from this because millions of people are cut from electricity supplies.
We have to introduce rolling power cuts in the country to maintain the perfect balance between generation and consumption in the system, and these rolling power cuts, of course, involve millions of our citizens, and this is going on during the winter.
But the ultimate goal of Russians, of course, is to initiate complete blackout of the system. And they use very clear strategies to inflict as much damage to power grid as possible. And that makes us think that they are consulted by their energy specialists to pick up targets. And of course they also are picking up time when it's cold outside to disconnect from the grid water supply heating systems, and therefore destroy this critical infrastructure, these types of critical infrastructure as well, because electricity grid is the most basic type of critical infrastructure. Without it, nothing else works.
So they selected attacks on electric grid for this very reason: to inflict as much suffering as possible. And this is probably their last chance to somehow change the situation in the battlefield with the war to make us negotiate with them.
You said Russian energy specialists — and Russian energy specialists know Ukrainian electricity system very well because the systems were connected. You, before the war, just few hours literally before the war, you changed, you become independent and connected with Europe. Were you able to sustain in this situation?
Well, four hours before the invasion, we disconnected from Russian and Belarusian grid. At that time, we did not know that there would be an invasion. This was a test that we had to pass to connect our grid in the future to European electric system. And European electric system is the largest machine that humanity has ever invented in the world. It's very stable.
And most of all, the most important thing is that we would like to be a part of European energy space. And of course we would like to be connected to a stable reliable system. But we had to operate three weeks until we were connected to Europe, three weeks in isolation during the war, during the invasion.
Instead you had three hours.
Instead of three days, we spent three weeks in isolation, and these three weeks were much more challenging than presumed three days of normal operation in isolated mode. We made a very interesting comparison.