Russian airstrikes damaged half of Ukraine's power grid in 2022, incurring $9 billion damage
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Russia damaged 270 power facilities across Ukraine in 2022, including 11 in eight different oblasts on the first day of the full-scale invasion, Yasno power company CEO Serhiy Kovalenko said in an interview with LIGA.net published on Oct. 30.
"Total damage is estimated at about $9 billion. We are talking about 270 power facilities across the country. That is 50% of the entire power grid,” Kovalenko said.
“These are large facilities; there is not a transformer near your house. This is either generation or something serious in distribution."
“Some of the facilities have been completely destroyed and cannot be repaired. It will take years and large investments to rebuild them.”
Earlier, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that Ukraine would respond to Russia's attacks on energy infrastructure.
Energy Minister Herman Halushchenko said that for the first time, Ukraine is implementing systems to protect critical infrastructure facilities from Russian attacks—both active and passive. The former is provided by air defense, and the latter by "systems that we will not talk about".
In October, the Ukrainian government supported the creation of a coordination center for rapid response to energy crises. When asked whether the coming winter would be harsher than the previous one, Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said that the state of Ukraine's energy system was much worse than last year.
Since last October, Russia has been actively conducting massive attacks on Ukraine's energy infrastructure. Over the course of several months, Ukraine experienced more than 10 waves of large-scale Russian airstrikes involving dozens of missiles.
The resulting shortage of electricity in the energy system forced the Energy Ministry to regularly cut off power supply to consumers, but despite the difficult winter, Russia failed to achieve its goal of causing a complete blackout in Ukraine.
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