DTEK, a prominent Ukrainian power company, arranges for soldiers to escort its emergency repair crews to reach damaged transmission lines.
Keeping millions of customers in Ukraine supplied with electric power amid the Russian invasion is, to say the least, challenging. Especially when the electrical grid itself becomes a target.
“What we see now is that they attack transmission lines, substations, power generating stations,”
said Maxim Timchenko, chief executive of DTEK,
a large private Ukrainian energy company. In the early days of the war, he said, the Russian military seemed to be wary of wrecking critical civilian infrastructure.
Now, he said, “they are not selective anymore.”
In a video call from an undisclosed location in western Ukraine, Mr. Timchenko described how DTEK, which supplies about 20 percent of Ukraine’s electricity, and other Ukrainian utilities were scrambling to keep the lights on during the Russian onslaught.
Amid the urgency, Ukraine, which is not a member of the European Union, has also managed to achieve something in a matter of weeks that it had worked on for years: a linkup to the power grids of neighboring E.U. member countries including, according to Mr. Timchenko, Romania, Slovakia, Poland and Hungary.
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