RUSSIA WAS already a month into its campaign to bomb Ukraine’s energy infrastructure campaign 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 screaming and running for the shelters. Others stayed above ground to try to shoot down the drones. But Mr Kudrytsky headed off to move parked cars to safer spaces. “Some of us have experienced five, ten, twenty attacks over this winter and at one point you cease being frightened,” he recalls. “We’ve learned to be calm while everyone else is losing their minds.”

The latest rocket attack, 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 historical battle in which few had expected it to prevail. Engineers are now repairing the system faster than it can be destroyed. Prior to 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 didn’t 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 came in late November. When the capital’s infrastructure was hit with 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 wasn’t 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, over fears pipes would freeze over and crack.

“This was a truly frightening moment,” Mr Kovalenko recalls. “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 fixing the damage on the ground. The process now resembles “a chess game with death,” says Yuriy Ihnat, a colonel in Ukrainian 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, Ukrainian air defence could rely only on Soviet-era systems such as S-300 and Buk, and a dwindling supply of missiles. 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%. Success on any particular day depends on a combination of factors: weather, the algorithms both sides use, and the missiles Russia fires. 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%.

On the infrastructure side of the equation, Ukraine has been helped by brave and ingenious engineering. Ukrenergo’s Mr Kudrytsky says he only ever worried for a couple of hours before he understood the problems would be fixed. 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 Mr Kudrytsky describes as mind-blowing engineering solutions. After drones hit one facility in November, a particularly had-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,” says Mr Kudrytsky. “But somehow they managed it.”

All across Ukraine, energy maintenance teams have been going to work in flak jackets and helmets. The working conditions of some locations tests nerves to the maximum. Maxim Yatsenko, 25, is one of a team of engineers working in Nikopol, a mere 10km (six miles) across the Dnipro river from Russian positions at the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant. Artillery barrages are still a daily event. “We’ve had shells landing 200m away, and flying over our heads. Sometimes, you are already too far into a job to stop.” It can be especially difficult on evening call-outs, he explains. The teams operate in darkness so as not to present a target. “You have to work by feeling your way around, connecting cables without actually seeing them.”

With Russian forces dug into the Zaporizhia nuclear plant, there does not yet look to be an easy resolution in sight for Nikopol or front-line regions like it. As Mr Yatsenko says, problems will probably continue for as long as the Russians are nearby. Yet away from the front lines, energy generation and distribution are largely stable. As the weather warms up, Ukraine’s energy planners have even taken to cracking jokes. Yasno, the company that introduced electricity rationing to Kyiv, has introduced a new online game allowing Kyivians the chance to connect and disconnect their neighbours during simulated “disaster events.” Yasno’s Mr Kovalenko notes the simulations are not a million miles from his winter reality. At the peak of electricity rationing in December, his company fielded calls from thousands of irate locals complaining their neighbours had electricity while they did not. “If I told you the exact number, I’d be ashamed.”

The Russian 2022 winter infrastructure operation caused an estimated $7bn of damage, and rendered up to half of Ukraine’s grid unusable at one stage. But the only indisputable lasting result is that Russia has expended much of its strategic reserve of missiles in the process: nearly 1000 missiles and a similar number of drones. Western officials believe Russia is now largely limited to using whatever comes off the production line. Ukraine on its part is now determined to remove as many remaining vulnerabilities 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.

Ukrenergo’s Mr Kudrytsky remains coy on the details, but he says Russia’s use of drones and heavy missiles to target civic infrastructure has made electricity operators the world over rethink vulnerabilities. He has grown in optimism about the resilience of Ukraine; its infrastructure and its people: “We showed things that seemed impossible can somehow become possible,” he says. “We made the impossible ordinary.” ■