“On 25 February 2022, Oleksandr Danyliuk woke up to see Russian soldiers. “I went to bed. The next morning I peered outside my window. It was 6.30am. There were four Russian armoured vehicles opposite my house,” he recalled. Danyliuk, an engineer with Ukraine’s largest private electricity company, DTEK, said Moscow’s invasion took him by surprise.”
Danyliuk’s story is at the heart of a report by The Guardian newspaper into how Ukraine is protecting its energy infrastructure from russian attacks as the country approaches winter.
Read the full story here.
Drawing heavily on interviews with DTEK engineers and CEO Maxim Timchenko, the Guardian’s Luke Harding outlines the intensive work being done by DTEK in order to get ready.
“In 2022 we had to improvise. Now we are better prepared,” the report quotes engineer Danyliuk as saying.
DTEK has spent $110m preparing for the possibility of another russian onslaught this winter.
“We have done everything possible and sometimes impossible to be prepared,” CEO Maxim Timchenko told the paper. “Nobody can guarantee there won’t be blackouts this winter. Unfortunately, we are at war. We can’t predict the scale of russian attacks. We will do everything we can so generators are not used.”
