DTEK CEO talks to The Financial Times about leadership in war

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What was it like running Ukraine’s largest private energy company when russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022? How has Ukraine kept the lights on ever since? And who are the unsung heroes of the war? These are some of the questions DTEK CEO Maxim Timchenko discussed in a recent, wide-ranging interview with the Financial Times, published on Sunday, 30 July.
 
The article describes Timchenko’s personal experiences in the first moments of invasion in 2022 and his focus on communicating with employees in those vital first hours. He speaks about his day-to-day mission to fortify the energy system against future strikes and how DTEK managed to survive financially in the cash-strapped first months of the war.

“Last year was not about money or about profits,” Timchenko told the FT. “It was about survival”.

He also describes the burden in receiving news of colleagues killed in fighting on the front or in service of the company. “The worst possible news you can get as CEO,” as he describes it.
 
The article, based on several interviews with FT Energy Editor David Sheppard in June and July, describes the “modernisation mission” that DTEK shareholder Rinat Akhmetov and Timchenko have been on ever since founding DTEK in 2005: to build a company that adheres to Western standards with “a western advisory board, signing up to EU-style climate commitments, and pushing to align Ukraine’s electricity grid and markets with western Europe.”
 
The chief executive also talks about the personal sacrifices made by the men and women who, in his eyes, are the real heroes: for example the miners who led their colleagues to safety in the darkness when russian strikes knocked the grid offline, or ‘the employee who rushed out to fight the flames when he saw, from his living room window, that his power plant had been hit’. “He could have made a different choice,” Timchenko tells the paper. “These are examples of leadership for me.”
 
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