“They said they wouldn’t let us go until there was light,” he recalls. THE SUN beats down on the utilities repair crew in Bereznyaky, a prefab-concrete suburb on Kyiv’s left bank. Winter-proofing the electricity grid is slow work, digging out hundreds of metres of Soviet-laid cable and replacing it with thicker lines able to withstand an emergency surge. But foreman Roman Kravchenko is cutting no corners; he knows what failure feels like. Last winter, after Russian missiles destroyed the local heating plant, residents switched to electric home heaters that burnt out the network. Hundreds of apartment blocks had no heat or power for weeks. At one point, an angry crowd penned in Mr Kravchenko’s crew.
Before this year not one of the capital’s 110-kilovolt transformers, which help step down current from high-tension lines to households, had been protected. Because of better management by the new energy minister, Denys Shmyhal, a former prime minister, the strategy is producing results, partly.
“By December we will have done three times more than in any year before,” says Oleksandr Kharchenko, an energy expert. Serhiy Sukhomlyn, its director, says the new defences should withstand anything short of a direct missile hit. One senior government official sees no reason why this winter would be better than the last; the capital will be “tormented” once the frosts arrive. “We’ll have done our work, that’s all we can do,” says Mr Kravchenko. “Now it’s down to the guys in air defence.”
From April, the government and energy companies began implementing a resilience plan. It has four priorities: enough local generation capacity to power critical infrastructure inside each major city; physical protection of crucial elements; decentralised heating; and a decentralised supply of electricity. A separate programme covers reserve water supplies. The State Restoration Agency has been particularly nimble. Its work matters most in Kyiv, where city authorities had lagged behind those in other cities, such as Kharkiv. Working round the clock, the agency has now shielded two dozen of them with netting and concrete reinforcements, while also fortifying power plants. His repair crew in Bereznyaky, filling in their trench, has reached much the same conclusion.
Even before the last winter was over, Ukraine’s security council resolved not to let it happen again. Mr Timchenko is more measured, but concedes that no one can guarantee that last year’s problems will not be repeated.
