Dark times. How Ukraine is surviving without light, water, and heat

Russia is doing all it can to turn the upcoming winter into an ordeal for Ukraine and the world at large. Starting from October 10, the Russian military has been pummeling Ukraine's energy infrastructure with massive missile attacks. November 15 saw the largest strike, with the Russians firing over 90 missiles. According to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, it left around 10 million civilians without electricity. Overall, more than 400 critical facilities of the energy and heating infrastructure have sustained damage since the beginning of the war.

Russia has targeted primarily electrical substations, which receive, transform, and distribute electricity and unite the elements of the national power grid into a single whole. Attacks on the substations were supposed to hack this whole into pieces. Secondary targets have been power-generating facilities – Ukraine’s power plants, according to Dmytro Sakharuk, the Executive Director of Ukraine's largest private energy company, DTEK. They are bigger and harder to put out of commission. The strikes of November 15 targeted gas-extracting facilities in the Odessa and Dnipropetrovsk regions. The Russians also hit the Khmelnytskyi NPP, temporarily cutting its power supply. The organizers of the attacks most likely knew how to do the most damage to the Ukrainian power grid and chose targets accordingly.