It’s not just Ukraine’s counteroffensive that is frozen. Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba told the German daily Die Welt yesterday that Ukraine will have large-scale blackouts this winter. Just last month, Ukrainian Energy Minister German Galushchenko urged people to buy generators and take other measures to reinforce the resilience to outages. In July, he had estimated that about 50% of all power-generating facilities had been damaged, with some of them beyond repair. Volodymyr Kudrytskyi, the head of the Ukrainian national power company, Ukrenergo, estimated in October that anywhere between a third and a half of the country’s generation facilities have been destroyed.
There is general agreement that Ukraine is in significantly worse shape going into winter than last year. National Security and Defense Council head Oleksiy Danilov reported in September that their discussions on the power grid led to the conclusion that it is up to local communities to provide people with electricity.
