Just outside Kyiv is a smoking crater where one of Ukraine’s largest power plants used to be.
The bombed-out ruin of the Trypilska Thermal Power Plant — the main electricity producer for millions of people — is a symbol of a devastating shift underway in Ukraine. For the past two years, Russia and its invading army have mostly targeted Ukraine’s energy transformers, the components that move power from one circuit to another. Such attacks were damaging, but the parts could be quickly repaired or substituted.
Now that entire power plants are in their crosshairs, the repairs are going to take years. In recent weeks Moscow has started inflicting far more permanent damage on Ukraine’s energy system, not only taking out generating stations but even going after the vast underground gas storage facilities the EU leaned on last winter to avoid its own energy shortages.
“Our thermal power plants have been attacked 48 times over the past six months, but without a doubt, Russia’s attacks in the past few weeks have been the worst since [the] full-scale invasion in 2022,” Maxim Timchenko, CEO of Ukraine’s largest private energy firm, DTEK, told POLITICO.
