Ukraine braces for winter as Russia shifts energy war to heat and water
by Guillaume Ptak · The Washington TimesKYIV, Ukraine — Ukraine has begun an unusually early race to prepare its battered energy system for another winter of Russian bombardment, building smaller power sources, protecting substations and preparing backup systems to keep heat and water flowing if Moscow renews the massive attacks that brought major cities close to the breaking point last winter.
The preparations come even as Russian strikes on energy infrastructure continue through the summer.
An Aug. 9 attack on Odesa damaged power facilities, leaving parts of the southern city without electricity, mobile communications and water. Ukrainian authorities later said power had been restored to about 90,000 customers. Four days later, a Russian attack damaged infrastructure at the Danube port of Izmail and knocked out electricity in part of the city.
Russia has also stepped up attacks on the country’s domestic oil and gas industry.
State-owned Naftogaz said seven Ukrnafta oil and gas production facilities were damaged in a single Aug. 7 attack. Two days later, another large wave hit Naftogaz Group assets around the country, including production facilities and a drilling site.
For Ukrainian officials and energy executives, the attacks suggest Moscow is already trying to complicate preparations for the 2026-27 heating season.
“This year Ukraine is preparing for winter with particular intensity, and the preparations began early, back in February and March,” Oleksandr Kharchenko, managing director of the Kyiv-based Energy Industry Research Center, told The Washington Times.
“For the first time in the war years, in my view, the Ukrainian authorities started winter preparations on time and in the way this work should be done.”
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Learning from a brutal winter
Last winter provided a grim test.
Repeated missile and drone attacks caused prolonged electricity, heating and water outages during periods of severe cold. A massive Feb. 12 barrage left nearly 300,000 people in Odesa without water while thousands of apartment buildings in Kyiv lost heat.
Mr. Kharchenko said those attacks exposed a vulnerability that goes beyond electricity generation.
“Last winter showed exactly where the system is most vulnerable: the critical infrastructure of large cities, heat supply above all, and water supply and wastewater during severe cold,” he said.
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President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned in March that Ukrainian intelligence expected water-supply infrastructure to become one of Russia’s principal targets and ordered local authorities to prepare. The government has since developed resilience plans for regions and major cities covering electricity, district heating, water supply and other essential services. Kyiv’s plan was approved by the National Security and Defense Council on Aug. 5.
The emphasis is increasingly on keeping essential services alive even if major generating plants are destroyed.
“The largest heat-supply facilities, the combined heat and power plants, are practically impossible to protect,” Mr. Kharchenko said. “They are too big for any fortifications.”
Instead, he said, regional plans are centered on decentralizing electricity, heating and water infrastructure, with smaller generators backing up boiler houses, pumping stations and water-treatment plants.
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Ukraine has spent several years adding gas turbines, gas-piston generators, batteries and other distributed sources that can continue operating when large plants or transmission lines are disabled.
Physical protection has also expanded. Mr. Kharchenko said some fortified energy installations have already survived dozens of Russian strikes.
“Taken together, decentralized power and heat generation, backup power for water supply and the fortifications being built, this will seriously complicate the Kremlin regime’s already declared plans to freeze Ukraine,” he said.
Ukraine’s nuclear plants remain central to the effort.
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Energoatom said Aug. 7 that scheduled maintenance and refueling had already been completed on five nuclear units and that its overall maintenance campaign was running 21 days ahead of schedule, increasing the chances that Ukraine’s nine operationally available reactors will be ready for peak winter demand.
The Energy Ministry is also building stocks of replacement hardware. Energy Minister Denys Shmyhal said this month that emergency hubs had received 5,700 tons of international assistance this year, while more than 3,300 tons of equipment removed from plants in Germany and Lithuania had been delivered for reuse in Ukraine.
The government’s goal is to establish reserves equal to three times the amount of critical equipment it expects to need.
Russia changes the target list
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Moscow, however, has adapted its tactics even as Ukraine has adapted its defenses.
Earlier campaigns concentrated heavily on large generating plants and high-voltage infrastructure. During the past winter, Russia increasingly used its growing fleet of relatively cheap attack drones against smaller distribution substations.
An analysis by the London-based Centre for Information Resilience found that nearly 60% of verified Russian energy strikes between October 2025 and April targeted smaller substations, compared with 31% during the previous winter. Ukraine has more than 3,000 such transformers and distribution facilities, making them far harder to protect comprehensively than the roughly 120 major high-voltage substations.
Russian forces have also used small drones close to the front line to probe physical defenses around substations, in some cases attacking protective netting before sending another drone toward exposed equipment. Reuters verified eight such strikes against 110- and 330-kilovolt substations this summer.
The result is a strategy aimed less at a single nationwide blackout than at creating repeated local failures, forcing repair crews to spread equipment and manpower across thousands of potential targets.
“The biggest risk is a cold winter,” Mr. Kharchenko said. “If serious frosts come, the Kremlin’s terrorist regime will try to destroy Ukraine’s heating systems and do everything it can to leave Ukrainians unable to heat their large cities.”
Equipment versus missiles
Money and procurement remain another weakness.
The Ukraine Energy Support Fund, the principal international mechanism used to procure equipment for damaged Ukrainian energy companies, has contracted more than $1 billion worth of assistance through roughly 1,300 supply contracts. But the Energy Community Secretariat said Thursday that about $520 million, or 444 million euros, remains unfunded from the immediate winter requirements identified in June.
Mr. Kharchenko said even money pledged months ago can move too slowly.
The fund received financing in March for reserves of critical equipment requested by power companies and cities, he said, but some tenders still had not been completed by mid-August.
“That means deliveries are effectively postponed until next spring,” he said.
DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy company, described a similar problem.
“From the moment our infrastructure is hit and we put out a call for help, it can take half a year before we’ve secured financing and complete procurement,” a DTEK spokesperson told The Times. “Things are faster than they used to be, but six months is still a long time given how mission critical this equipment can be.”
Ultimately, Ukrainian energy officials say transformers, generators and fortifications can only mitigate the damage if Russian missiles continue getting through.
Mr. Zelenskyy this week again appealed to Washington for additional Patriot interceptor missiles, saying access to even 5% of existing U.S. stocks would significantly improve Ukraine’s ability to protect itself through the winter.
“Resilience guides everything we do as an energy operator that’s been continuously targeted for more than four years,” the DTEK spokesperson said. “We restore and rebuild as quickly as possible and are rolling out more decentralized assets that are harder for Russia to hit.”
But, the spokesperson added, “without effective air defences, all our hard work can be destroyed in seconds in the next massive attack.”
“Greater supplies of defensive interceptor missiles from allies in the months ahead are absolutely critical as winter approaches.”