Blog

KYIV, Ukraine — For months, Ukrainian officials have warned people to brace for what could be their hardest winter at war. Russia, they said, would use its ever more powerful weapons to try to cripple the country’s power grid. The first big strike was expected later this fall, with the first bite of cold.

Russia did not wait that long. Before dawn on Wednesday, missiles and drones slammed into a large thermal power plant and other energy facilities, shaking the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, with explosions. By morning, several neighborhoods were without power and water.

The attack, Ukrainian officials said, marked the opening salvo of a new campaign to plunge Ukrainian cities into cold and darkness, with the ultimate goal of breaking people’s morale and crippling the war effort. Russia has waged similar campaigns each year, with mixed results, but it is approaching this winter armed with stocks of ballistic missiles and jet-powered drones that Ukraine has struggled to intercept.

The scale of Russia’s ambition to freeze Ukrainians into submission is evident in a document that the Ukrainian energy minister, Denys Shmyhal, showed to European partners in Paris two weeks ago, according to two people familiar with his presentation.

Shmyhal, the people said, described the document as an intercepted Russian plan to cause the energy system to collapse through methodical attacks. The plan, a copy of which the New York Times obtained, describes a campaign of strikes using up to 1,000 missiles, drones, and bombs. They would target a wide range of facilities, including electrical substations, hydroelectric and thermal power plants, and boiler houses.

Most alarming, the document says that Russia intends to force Ukraine’s three operating nuclear plants — the backbone of its power infrastructure — to shut down by firing missiles at the electrical switchyards that connect them to the grid. The switchyards sit less than a mile from the reactors.

The plan also says that Moscow will target Ukraine’s water system, including pumping stations and wastewater treatment facilities, with dozens of ballistic missiles and glide bombs. Russia has never attacked such sites on a large scale before. Ukrainian officials have privately expressed concern that the country has limited backup plans should it face severe water disruptions.

The ultimate goal is to cut off major Ukrainian cities from power, heat and water, which could set off a humanitarian crisis. Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Odesa are highlighted as top targets, with plans to cut electricity supplies in those cities by 90%, reduce heating supplies by up to 90% and severely disrupt the sewage system.

The New York Times had no way to independently authenticate the document, which is dated from August and written in Russian. But President Vladimir Putin of Russia has publicly stated that his forces will wage an extensive campaign this winter to knock out Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, framing it as retaliation for Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil refineries.

Shmyhal spoke in vague terms about the document to the Ukrainian media a week ago, saying, “Our partners, like us, were struck by its cynicism, by this cold, terrorist calculation of how to destroy our energy sector.”

Whether Russia will follow through on the strategy laid out in the document — and whether it will succeed if it does so — remains to be seen.

Ukraine has spent the past several months preparing for the winter, building protective structures above critical facilities, such as substations that carry electricity across the country. Civilians, most of whom endured severe power and heating cuts last winter, have stocked up on batteries and small gas-powered heaters.

Ukrainian authorities have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to repair power plants and substations, as well as to install smaller energy facilities like gas-powered turbines that are harder to strike. Ukraine has also invested in strengthening the grid to withstand cold-weather demand and reroute power when attacks knock out transmission lines.

Energy experts caution that these measures can at best cushion the expected blow, not stop it. Olena Pavlenko, head of DiXi Group, a Ukrainian energy think tank, said that four winters of war had left the country’s power grid so weakened that getting through another would be like “running a marathon with only one lung.”

Memories of last winter, by far the hardest of the war so far, in part because of particularly bitter temperatures, still loom large for Ukrainians and explain their dread of another Russian strike campaign.

As Russia repeatedly hit power and heating plants, Kyiv residents regularly endured a dozen hours or more without electricity each day, according to data shared by DTEK, the country’s largest private energy company and the capital’s electricity distributor.

Olha Skorokhod, a resident of central Kyiv, said she lost heat for two weeks last January as temperatures outside fell well below freezing. She had to wash her 3-year-old daughter, Zoriana, in cold water, and worried that she might get sick as a result. Changing the child’s clothes was an ordeal as the cold nipped at her bare skin. At one point, Skorokhod tried to warm the apartment by heating bricks on a small gas stove. It barely made a difference.

In high-rises across the capital, residents on the top floors often had no water because the pumps lost power. To get to their apartments, they had to climb flight after flight of stairs because the elevators were out of service. Even when the power returned for a few hours, some avoided the elevators, afraid of getting trapped during a sudden outage.

To avoid a repeat this winter, power crews have been hard at work. On Monday, a repair team from DTEK was busy replacing an old transformer with a new one near Kyiv. They lifted the old unit off a pole and replaced it with a new transformer in a protective casing.

“There’s old equipment that simply can’t handle the load anymore,” said the crew leader, Eduard Kashkov, 57. “Some of the equipment is as old as I am.”

Last winter showed that local equipment can fail when power returns after an outage and large numbers of people plug in at once to charge batteries, Kashkov said. The new transformer, he added, was built to handle the surge in consumption.

Speaking to parliament in August, Shmyhal expressed confidence that Ukraine would enter the winter well prepared. The country had about 15 gigawatts of available capacity, he said, and he expected it to grow to more than 21 gigawatts by year end. That would be enough to cover peak demand, which reached about 18 gigawatts last winter.

But his projections did not account for attacks like Wednesday’s, which can undo months of repairs. Maria Tsaturian, an energy analyst at the research group Ukraine Facility Platform, said it could take only a few attacks to knock out the five gigawatts that Ukraine had restored in recent months. She pointed to the power outages after Wednesday’s strike as evidence of the grid’s fragility.

Russia’s intercepted plan appears designed to collapse Ukraine’s already weakened grid.

It lays out three stages of attacks. The first would knock out substations near Ukraine’s western borders, which import electricity from Europe. The second would take out hydroelectric power plants. The third would force Ukraine’s three operating nuclear plants offline. (A fourth nuclear plant, near the southern city of Zaporizhzhia, was captured by Russian forces early in the war and is not operating.)

The goal of the attacks, the document says, is to eliminate nearly 15 gigawatts of generating capacity — as much as Ukraine had at the end of the summer.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.