A Blog by Jonathan Low

 

Nov 19, 2022

Ukraine Is Making Headway In Restoring Power After Russian Attacks

It is a monumental task made harder by the repeated destruction but thanks to ingenuity and planning, Ukraine is making headway in restoring some power and keeping the situation from getting worse. JL 

Marc Santora reports in the New York Times:

For the first time since Moscow this past week carried out its largest assault on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, the national energy utility said on Saturday that it was again able to use planned, coordinated blackouts to keep the national grid stabilized rather than having to rely on emergency power shutdowns. The first traces of power were also restored to recently reclaimed Kherson. To underscore Ukraine’s determination to rebuild, the first train from Kyiv rolled into a station in Kherson on Saturday morning. “No one in the world has thrown a system the size of the Ukrainian one into blackout.”

For the first time since Moscow this past week carried out its largest assault on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, the national energy utility said on Saturday that it was again able to use planned, coordinated blackouts to keep the national grid stabilized rather than having to rely on emergency power shutdowns.

The first traces of power were also restored to the recently reclaimed southern city of Kherson, which has been left without heat, running water and electricity since Russian troops blew up and tore down critical infrastructure as they fled to territory east of the Dnipro River.

“We know that it is very difficult for people, because the occupiers destroyed everything before fleeing,” President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said in his overnight address to the nation late Friday. “But we will connect everything, restore everything.”

Every place Russian forces have retreated, they have behind a trail of destruction. It was true around Kyiv and across the northeastern Kharkiv region, and is now the case in Kherson.

Across fields strewn with mines and at power plants under the threat of Russian missiles, workers with the Ukrainian utility, Ukrenergo, have raced to fix damage caused by attacks intended to heap suffering on Ukraine’s people. But repairs made this week can be destroyed by a new Russian assault the next.

Ukraine’s government says that nearly half of Ukraine’s energy grid has been knocked out by recent Russian missile strikes. Kyiv also estimates that nearly 61,000 square miles could be littered with land mines and other explosives. Some cities and towns lie in ruins.

In a moment that underscored Ukraine’s determination to rebuild, the first train from Kyiv rolled into a station in the city of Kherson on Saturday morning. The station was itself the first building in the recently reclaimed regional capital to have its lights turned on.

Volodymyr Kudrytsky, the head of Ukrenergo, said that energy crews were traveling across Kherson, working step by step with mine clearers, known as sappers. It can take them more than an hour to clear a single yard of land, he said, so the work will take time.

“Our repairmen follow the sappers, carefully, but persistently and stubbornly,” he said. 

The city of Kherson has been without power since Nov. 6. And while Mr. Kudrytsky said on Saturday that the work was harder than they would like, he vowed that “Kherson will be with light.”

Serhiy Kruk, the head of the state emergency service, said the scale of the mines scattered across Ukraine by Russian forces was hard to fathom. With mines covering an area about the size of Austria, he said it would take months before power and other infrastructure could be restored to allow the return of “full-fledged life” across recently recaptured areas. But he expressed hope that in coming days and weeks, essential services like heat and running water could be restored in Kherson.

Oleksandr Kharchenko, the director of the Energy Industry Research Center in Ukraine, said that utility workers and engineers were facing an unprecedented crisis.

“No one in the world has thrown a system the size of the Ukrainian one into blackout,” he said. Correspondingly, he said, no nation has then tried to restore such a vast system.

Although progress in repairs are made every hour, he said, it takes a terrible toll on the workers to see repairs destroyed by Russian strikes. “You work, recover it, and they hit it again and again,” he said. “Still, the recovery works continue.”

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