As Winter Approaches, Russian Attacks Are Degrading Ukraine's Power Grid

Since October 10, Russia has been waging an intensified air campaign against Ukraine's civilian infrastructure. While missile strikes on playgrounds and pedestrian bridges have attracted a disproportionate share of international attention, Russian rockets and Iranian-supplied drones continue to methodically degrade the Ukrainian power grid.

"Russia failed spectacularly in its attempt to seize Ukraine militarily, and now they're turning to a brutality campaign aimed at making the country uninhabitable just as winter is starting to set in," Suriya Jayanti, a non-resident fellow at the Atlantic Council and former energy chief at the U.S. embassy in Kyiv, told Newsweek.

On Tuesday, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced that "Since Oct. 10, 30% of Ukraine's power stations have been destroyed." It is a statistic that does not necessarily communicate the full extent of the damage.

"The 30% figure likely means that these facilities are temporarily offline, but it isn't only power plants which have been hit," Jayanti explained. "Almost all substations have also been damaged, many of them irreparably. If Ukraine does not get immediate help —monetary aid, shipments of critical equipment, and technical assistance — it could lose the power it needs to maintain its defenses."

Jayanti shared a list of equipment currently being sought by one Ukrainian energy company in order to replace items taken offline by the recent waves of Russian attacks.

"I don't know how successful they've been thus far in procuring replacements," she said, "but the fact that the list is so extensive suggests that the damage to date is substantial."

While speedy repairs and strong requests to cut back on electricity usage have thus far limited the extent and duration of power outages, Russia likely possesses the capacity to increase the intensity of its air campaign.

"Ukraine can fix damage to objects of critical infrastructure so long as the number of targets that Russia is hitting remains relatively limited," Mike Mihajlovic, an engineer, former air defense officer, and current energy consultant, told Newsweek. "However, that does not mean that they have the resources to cope with a more massive attack or a more sustained assault."

When analyzing the potential soft spots in the Ukrainian power grid, Mihajlovic emphasized the importance of transformer substations, a subject that Jayanti also stressed. When electricity is produced, transformers placed near the power plant itself are used to scale up voltage for delivery through power lines to industrial centers and residential hubs. When the electricity approaches its destination, other transformers are then used to scale down the voltage to a level appropriate for use in factories and homes.

"If you hit all substations at the same time, the whole power grid is going to collapse. That's it. Done. Total darkness," Mihajlovic explained. "At the moment, Russia is hitting them in a way that cripples the system without destroying it. That can change though."

Ukraine's growing array of Western-supplied air defense systems means that the Russian Air Force cannot fly bombing sorties over Kyiv or Lviv the way it did over Grozny and Aleppo in past wars. Additionally, nearly all Western military analysts who have examined the subject have concluded that Russia's stocks of precision guided missiles is running low.

However, Russia's procurement of low-cost Iranian Shahed-136 drones has likely given the Kremlin the capability to execute the kind of all-out attack that Mihajlovic described.

"I don't like to think of it in terms of can or can't, but by degrees of difficulty," Marcel Plichta, a former U.S. Department of Defense analyst and current doctoral candidate at the University of St. Andrews, told Newsweek.

"The overwhelming majority of the drones that Russia sends into Ukraine are being shot down," Plichta said, "but when drones are massed, the percentage that ends up getting taken out by air defenses decreases."

"The drones they're using carry a substantially smaller payload than a missile, and so in order to destroy a substation, they need to send enough of them to be reasonably sure that at least one makes it through and actually hits the target." he explained. "It's difficult, but we already have several examples of them doing exactly that."

"And of course, if the target is a power plant, the strike does not have to be perfectly accurate in order to inflict substantial damage," he added.

Plichta sees the potential for a sustained Russian air campaign to create difficult choices for military planners in Kyiv.

"Ukraine does not have sufficient air defense systems to completely protect every single substation and power plant in the country," he said. "The farther you move away from the front lines, or from the capital itself, the less likely it is that the area is going to be covered with robust, layered air defenses."

By targeting a few objects at a time over an extended period, Plichta added, "Russia can force Ukraine to make hard choices about which facilities to prioritize and which to leave more vulnerable to Russian attack."

Despite Western shipments of advanced air defense platforms such as the German IRIS-T SLM, and the promised delivery of U.S. NASAMS launchers, Russia is unlikely to be deterred from targeting critical elements of Ukraine's civilian infrastructure.

"The systems Ukraine is receiving are very effective, but the most common missile Ukraine is likely to be using for the NASAMS is called an AIM-120, which cost nearly $1 million apiece," Plichta explained. "To use an anti-aircraft missile like that against a $30,000 drone might not seem like great math, but it's still better than allowing the drone to hit its target and cause $30 million worth of damage."

"And of course, Ukraine still will not have enough of these advanced systems to be able to place them everywhere at once," he added.

Russia, for its part, is signaling its intent to inflict as much pain as possible on Ukrainian civilians, even as the Ukrainian army continues to liberate formerly occupied territory in the country's South and East. In a television appearance on October 19, Russian MP and retired Lieutenant General Andrey Gurulyov laid out Moscow's rationale.

"The absence of electricity means the absence of water, the absence of refrigerators, and the absence of sewer systems, Gurulyov said. "The city of Kyiv, after one week without electricity, will be swimming in crap."

"These strikes that are being carried out today, I believe, are very effective," he added. "Our operation of destroying critical infrastructure...is disabling select objects necessary to bring about the collapse of the country."