How Ukraine tamed Russian missile barrages and kept the lights on

RUSSIA WAS already a month into its campaign to bomb Ukraine’s energy infrastructure when the man in charge of Ukraine’s power grid, Volodymyr Kudrytsky, saw a fleet of kamikaze drones headed towards his office. The attack on October 17th at Ukrenergo’s Kyiv headquarters sent many of his colleagues running for the shelters. Soldiers stayed above ground to try to shoot down the drones. Mr Kudrytsky headed off in his car to help colleagues. “Some of us have experienced five, ten, 20 attacks over this winter and at one point you cease being frightened,” he recalls.

The latest raid, in the early hours of March 9th, saw Russia target hundreds of millions of dollars-worth of missiles on critical infrastructure. It tested the tenacity of energy planners for the 15th time this winter. But with most of the country swiftly brought back on line, it did not change the fundamentals; Ukraine is still winning a battle in which few had expected it to prevail. Engineers are now repairing the system faster than it can be destroyed. Before the latest attack, Kyiv had enjoyed four consecutive weeks with no outages. The use by Russia of hard-to-replace Kinzhal air-launched ballistic missiles at the end of winter would appear to indicate increasing desperation in Moscow.

Things were certainly touch and go at times. The initial Russian operation was clinical, targeting hundreds of high-voltage transformers, the house-size workhorses of the national power grid. No electricity meant no gas, no water, no sewage, no heating. Some predicted frozen cities and a humanitarian crisis with millions of refugees. That this did not happen is down to preparation, luck, quick thinking, and new air-defence systems that began to arrive just in time. More than 100 energy workers have lost their lives in the battle.

The darkest days were in late November. When the capital’s infrastructure was hit by a barrage of 67 missiles on the 23rd, the system began to switch off automatically to protect itself. For a few hours, Kyiv was completely without electricity, says Serhiy Kovalenko, CEO of Yasno, the company that supplies energy to the capital. It was not clear when the system would come back on again, or whether, indeed, the damaged grid could even support the necessary currents when it did. There was talk that the city would have to drain water from its heating system, for fear that pipes would freeze over and crack. “This was a truly frightening moment,” recalls Mr Kovalenko. “We didn’t know if it was a matter of hours, days, or even weeks. We were joyful when the grid slowly began to function again later the same day.”

As the Russian campaign ground on, Ukraine became ever more adept at countering the airborne threat, and at fixing the damage on the ground. The process now resembles “a chess game with death”, says Yuriy Ihnat, a colonel in Ukraine’s Air Force Command. “The enemy tries to outwit us, and we try to outwit the enemy.” The Russians look to locate and destroy Ukrainian air defences using all the tools at their disposal: A-50 airborne early-warning aircraft, which can detect any Ukrainian missile launch; drones; satellites; and a network of spies. Ukraine responds with its own techniques: deception in the form of fake launch positions, and keeping air-defence assets as mobile as it can.

At the start of the winter, Ukraine could rely only on Soviet-era systems such as S-300s and Buks. When things were bad, it managed an interception rate of just 20-30%. More recently, with the help of new mobile groups and Western air-defence systems like NASAMS, that figure is, Ukraine claims, regularly above 75%. Ukraine’s new Patriot air-defence systems are yet to come on line, so Ukraine cannot intercept high-speed missiles like the Kh-22 anti-ship missile and Kinzhal air-launched hypersonic ballistic missile. The use of such expensive and scarce missiles in the attack on March 9th explains the low interception rate of below 50%.

Ukraine has been helped by ingenious engineering. Ukrenergo’s Mr Kudrytsky says his company had deliberately kept back-up stock of high-voltage equipment when refurbishing substations in the years before the war. Besides that, there were what he describes as mind-blowing engineering solutions. After drones hit one facility in November, a particularly hard-to-replace piece of hardware went up in flames. There was no obvious substitute in the storeroom. So the technical team decided to attempt what should have been an impossible repair. “In the electric world, if something is on fire at a voltage class of 330,000V or higher, you say goodbye to it,” he says. “But somehow they managed it.”

Russia’s winter attacks on infrastructure rendered up to half of Ukraine’s grid unusable at one stage. But the only indisputably lasting result is that the aggressor has expended much of its reserve of kit: nearly 1,000 missiles and a similar number of drones. Western officials believe Russia is now largely limited to using whatever comes off the production line.

Ukraine for its part is determined to remove as many remaining weaknesses as it can for the months and years ahead. The government has already announced novel plans to protect some of the most vulnerable parts of the grid underground, and to increase air defences above it. Mr Kudrytsky is coy about the details, but, he says, “We showed things that seemed impossible can somehow become possible…We made the impossible ordinary.” ■