KHARKIV, Ukraine — Russia early on made clear it considered Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure a legitimate target as its armies sought to conquer the country’s smaller neighbor.
But Ukrainians say that the attacks in recent weeks have come with unprecedented ferocity as Russian forces press an initiative in the country’s south and east, impairing much of the country’s energy infrastructure and costing an estimated $1 billion worth of damages.
A tour of the battered environs of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city with a pre-war population of nearly 1.5 million, offers vivid evidence of the devastation — physical and personal — of the infrastructure wars.
“I was walking back home and heard a massive explosion,” recounts 74-year-old Valerii Kharchenko, a resident of Kharkiv’s Kholodnohirs’kyi district. “It was very, very loud.”
On the afternoon of Friday, May 3, a Russian glide bomb tore through the cloudless sky and landed on this quiet residential neighborhood, annihilating two houses and killing an 82-year-old woman. As stunned onlookers gathered around the smoldering ruins and firefighters put out the last glowing embers, Mr. Kharchenko told the Washington Times that the event — though horrific — was far from unexpected: Over the past few months, Russian bombs and militarized drones have been striking major cities and small villages alike all over the country.
Along with a numbing regularity of civilian deaths from the attacks, a pattern has emerged over recent weeks as Russian forces methodically struck Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in a bid to paralyze the country and break Ukrainian resolve. It was a strategy already employed in the winter of 2022, when Russia launched the first wave of strikes against Ukraine’s electricity and heating infrastructure, resulting in half of the country’s energy sector being put out of commission.
But while this renewed bombing campaign was not unexpected, its intensity and the ensuing devastation have put the country on its heels.
Ukrainian Energy Minister German Galushchenko on May 5 declared on national television that Russian strikes targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure had already resulted in over $1 billion worth of damages, with no signs of a let-up.
“The attacks continue, and it is obvious that the losses will increase,” he warned.
Oleksandr Kharchenko, director of the Energy Industry Research Center and advisor on energy policy to the Ukrainian government, said the Russian attacks have increased not only in tempo but in effectiveness.
“In October and November 2023, the Russians tried to attack our power grid without much success,” he said. “They took a pause and gathered intelligence on our energy system — what is currently undergoing maintenance, what is reliable, where our air defense systems are located, and so on.”
Russian forces were at it again as recently as Wednesday, unleashing a nighttime barrage of more than 50 missiles at multiple grid targets and the country’s rail network around the country, including facilities in the Vinnytsia, Zaporizhzhia, Kirovohrad, Poltava and Ivano-Frankivsk regions.
Andrii Herus, chairman of the Ukrainian parliament’s committee on energy, told the Associated Press this week that, all told, the damage to Ukraine’s power infrastructure has totaled some $12.5 billion since Russia first invaded in February 2022, with $1 billion of that damage coming in just the past two weeks.
According to Mr. Kharchenko, the analyst, the Kremlin has recruited Russian energy industry professionals to help refine this new bombing campaign.
“They know very well how the energy industry operates and where its vulnerable points are located,” he said. “So they changed tack: Instead of targeting the high-voltage power grid, they strike three or four power-generating units at once with up to 20 drones and 10 or 15 missiles.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin has said the accelerating attacks are in part a response to Ukraine’s own decision to strike Russian oil refineries and other production points as the war has dragged on. Just this week, a missile fire from inside Ukraine hit an oil terminal and injured five workers in the Russian-controlled Luhansk region, the AP reported.
The new approach was used to devastating effect on March 22 when Russia unleashed more than 150 missiles and drones against its neighbor, striking a number of strategic installations across Ukraine and causing widespread power outages.
Tempting target
Located a mere 18 miles away from the Russian border, Kharkiv has suffered more than any other Ukrainian city from this renewed bombing campaign.
While missile and drone strikes against the city had never fully stopped, their intensity had abated somewhat over the course of 2023, leading to many residents returning to their hometowns. From around 300,000 inhabitants in the first few months of the invasion, Kharkiv’s population swelled back to 1,3 million over the past year.
Kharkiv Mayor Ihor Terekhov believes that the Russians are now trying to render the city “uninhabitable” by methodically destroying its critical infrastructure.
“On March 22, they struck all of our thermal power plants and all of our substations, leading to a complete blackout,” Mr. Terekhov told The Washington Times in an interview late last week.
The visibly exhausted mayor had been delayed on his way to our interview by the latest Russian strikes on the city.
“We were able to source electricity from other regions and cities,” he said, “but currently, we don’t have any production capacity left in Kharkiv.” Already targeted in September 2022, the city’s “TEC-5” thermal power plant was severely damaged during the March 22 attack and subsequently had to halt its operations.
“The plant’s restoration involves the manufacture of exclusive equipment for the production units,” Oleksandr Minkovich, the plant’s managing director, said at the time. “If the work is fully financed, production is supported and the equipment is delivered, the reconstruction process will take more than a year.”
The very same day, the Zmiivska power plant — the region’s largest — was entirely destroyed in another Russian attack.
These strikes have already put a significant strain on Ukraine’s energy sector: “The complete restoration of our power plants will take a long time,” admitted Mariia Tsaturian, head of communications at Ukrainian energy operator Ukrenergo in late April, adding that additional power cuts were to be expected over the summer.
Since March 22, Ukraine has had to import electricity from its neighbors while engaging in frantic repairs across the beleaguered country. Oleksandr Kharchenko predicts the Ukrainian energy sector will need to be entirely restructured if it is to survive the war.
“We need to reconfigure and decentralize our production capacity, replace all coal-powered infrastructure by gas-fired turbines, pistons and engines,” he said. “We need to move away from our current model, which is huge plants placed near the coal production regions, to instead hundreds of generation units disseminated throughout our cities..”
Mr. Kharchenko believes power grid decentralization would further lessen the force of the Russian attacks, ensuring that a single strike doesn’t lead to country-wide blackouts.
“Ukraine has 25 cities of more than 200,000 inhabitants where we need to install power-generating infrastructure to save citizens directly where they live,” he said. “That ought to be our priority over the next two years.”
Mayor Terekhov endorses the shift.
“We’re now in a position where we need to decentralize these systems to prevent their complete destruction by a single missile or drone,” he said. “This is a matter of survival for our people over the winter.”
Whether the restructuring of Ukraine’s massive energy sector happens in time for the coming cold weather later this year is anyone’s guess, But Kharkiv residents have sworn that they won’t abandon their city, come what may.
“This is our city, we love it, and we’re not going anywhere,” a defiant Valerii Kharchenko said, choking back tears. “There are no two cities like Kharkiv in all of Ukraine.”
• Guillaume Ptak can be reached at gptak@washingtontimes.com.