Attacks on energy supplies: Kyiv defies the darkness

For a month now, Russia has been deliberately destroying infrastructure in Ukraine that ensures the energy supply. Winter is just around the corner and the lights are going out in the capital. Many still want to stay.

TEvery day Volodymyr Kudrytskyj receives new bad news. A broken power line in the south, a destroyed power plant in the west, a broken substation in the east. It is an unequal battle that the CEO of the Ukrainian electricity supplier Ukrenergo is currently fighting. “The time to launch a missile at civilian infrastructure is much less than the time it takes us to rebuild.”

For a long time he struggles for words when he speaks, his eyelids droop. For the past two years, 36-year-old Kudrytsky has been making sure that Ukrainians can watch TV, do laundry and turn on the coffee machine in the morning. On the very morning that the FAZ met him for an interview, 450,000 people in Kiev were without electricity. “It’s a direct result of Russia’s missile attacks,” he says. “They know exactly what to hit in order to do as much damage as possible to the Ukrainian capital’s energy supply.”