Ukraine fears nuclear plants are in Russia’s sights as missile strikes bring winter blackouts

Ukraine marked 1,000 days of full-scale war with Russia last week, the season’s first snowfall covered Kyiv and a sight familiar from the last two winters returned to its night-time streets: little pools of light bobbing along icy pavements as people use the torches on their phones to navigate the city during power cuts.
It is not pitch black – car headlights also pierce the gloom, traffic lights blink orange and generators burble into life to keep many shops, bars and restaurants working, while electricity firms maintain supplies to hospitals and other essential facilities.
But most of the three million or so people in Kyiv, as with residents of nearly every region of the country, now face scheduled blackouts in their homes of up to eight hours a day, at the start of what officials and energy experts warn will be the hardest winter of the war.
Russia has fired hundreds of missiles and strike drones at Ukraine’s power stations and other parts of the grid in waves of attacks this year, overwhelming its air defences and destroying more than 60 per cent of its electricity-generating capacity.
The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for four senior Russian commanders, including former defence minister Sergei Shoigu, for their role in targeting Ukraine’s critical infrastructure, but the campaign has not stopped.
A strike using more than 200 missiles and drones on November 17th killed at least seven people and pounded the already fragile grid, hitting generating and distribution facilities and damaging three of the remaining five power stations operated by Dtek, Ukraine’s biggest private energy firm. Worst hit was the Black Sea port city of Odesa, where hundreds of thousands of people were without heat, light and water supplies for more than a day.
The strike exposed Ukraine’s shortage of modern air defence protection, a vulnerability that Russia exploited last Thursday by firing an experimental ballistic missile for the first time in combat at the eastern city of Dnipro.
[ Ukraine urges West to strengthen air defences and supply systems to combat new Russian missilesOpens in new window ]
Ukraine will face a precarious balancing act in the winter months, when temperatures often fall below minus 10, to maintain basic utilities while also keeping hospitals open and powering industries that are vital for national defence.
The International Energy Agency said recently that when winter takes hold “it will become much more difficult to live and work with limited access to electricity and heat. Home to roughly 70 per cent of the population, Ukraine’s urban centres are particularly vulnerable to unreliable electricity supply, given the strong concentration of high-rise buildings that need electricity for elevators and water pumps.
“A period of extreme cold over the coming winter would take a massive toll on the overall population and put enormous pressure on the already overstretched health system,” the 31-member intergovernmental organisation warned. “If the winter is accompanied by inadequate provision of heat or electricity, this could lead to a renewed wave of refugees moving to other parts of Ukraine and abroad, as some places in the country become simply unlivable.”
Russia’s onslaught against Ukraine’s conventional and hydroelectric power stations has sharply increased its dependence on three nuclear plants that remain under its control, which now cover about 60 per cent of national energy consumption.
Moscow’s forces are occupying one Ukrainian nuclear power station in the southeastern region of Zaporizhzhia – the biggest such plant in Europe – and Kyiv fears they could cripple the country’s remaining stations by hitting electricity substations nearby.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), an arm of the United Nations, said this month’s large Russian missile strike did affect four such substations and their power lines, forcing nuclear power plants (NPPs) to cut output as a precaution.
After similar Russian attacks in August, IAEA inspectors “documented extensive damage to all the substations visited, concluding that the grid’s capability to provide a reliable off-site power supply to Ukrainian NPPs has been significantly reduced,” the agency’s director, Rafael Grossi, said last week.
“The growing instability of the power grid is a deepening source of concern for nuclear safety, affecting all the nuclear power plants,” he warned.
[ Ukraine says Russian bombing poses ‘real danger’ of nuclear disasterOpens in new window ]
Fear of a nuclear disaster is acute in Ukraine, where the world’s worst such accident took place at Chernobyl in 1986 when it was still part of the Soviet Union.
“Now [Russia] does seem to be planning attacks on our nuclear power plants and their infrastructure, aiming to disconnect the plants from the power grid,” Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy told the UN general assembly in September. “A day like that must never come. And Moscow needs to understand this.”