Ukraine is about to experience its most brutal winter since Russia invaded in 2022. That is not a risk, but a certainty as both sides sense they are blocked on the ground and focus on the long-range air war. Russia has a plan for victory and the Ukrainians have one for survival. The question is whether Kyiv’s allies have a plan at all. The short answer is no, or at least not yet.
US President Donald Trump’s decision to sanction Russia’s two largest oil producers, Rosneft JSC and Lukoil PJSC, has offered a ray of hope — but that is all. It is unclear whether Trump is willing to endure the costs involved in enforcing those sanctions hard or long enough to change Russian President Vladimir Putin’s calculations. Worse, US-Ukraine policy remains contradictory, because the Trump administration has at the same time pushed the entire financial burden for arming and aiding Ukraine onto a cash-strapped Europe.
Europe knows the only feasible way to fill the hole left by US financial withdrawal is to tap 140 billion euros (US$163 billion) of frozen Russian central bank assets. Belgium — where most of the money is held — just blew up a deal for fear of having to shoulder the cost of legal retaliation; at best this happens in December. Meanwhile, Ukraine looks set to run out of cash by the end of the first quarter of next year.
This faltering political will in Washington and Europe has turned Kyiv’s allies into the war’s soft underbelly. It is what they do next, or rather do not do, that likely decides how it ends, because Ukraine’s plan for survival depends on staying in the fight long enough for the rising costs of Putin’s invasion to persuade him he cannot afford to continue.
A visit to Ukraine was necessary to examine exactly what the government’s “defend, restore, develop” mantra for making it through winter consists of. The “defend” element is covered by new developments in counter-drone technologies, fortifying major electrical substations, and the pursuit of more munitions from the US and Europe. It is not enough to neuter the impact of Russia’s dramatic increase in drone and missile production, which enables it to routinely fire volleys up to 10 times larger than in previous winters. This onslaught has already destroyed about 60 percent of Ukraine’s natural gas production capacity, adding more than US$2 billion to import bills this winter. That is more money Kyiv does not have.
One executive at a mid-size private energy company said that the same facility they had repaired last year after it was hit by two drones was struck by 17 at once this summer, causing far more damage. So “restore” takes more time and funding than it used to. It is the “develop” part of the formula that is most intriguing.
Oleksandr Selyshchev, CEO for renewables at DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy investor, showed reporters 70 2.5m-tall battery storage cubes his company had just installed near Kyiv. It was one of six such facilities around the country that had come online just days before, with a total capacity of 200 megawatts (MW), or about half the output of a typical nuclear reactor. When Russia destroys part of the power network, the batteries from the US’ Fluence Energy Inc should kick in within milliseconds to prevent the sudden imbalances in the grid that force blackouts.
There is also a DTEK windfarm project about a two-hour drive from Odesa, in southern Ukraine. The company decided to restart construction of a 500MW site in mid-2022, as soon as it became clear Russia was attacking energy infrastructure. That might seem like an odd choice, given that the 450 million euros investment would immediately become a target, but it turns out green energy is better suited to war; turbines spread over dozens of square kilometers are much harder to destroy than a single coal or gas-fired power plant.
One turbine, struck during a Russian attack earlier this year, was dismantled. A damaged 79m blade, thick enough to stand in, lay next to an access track. The 61-tonne blade hub had been lifted down that morning, but the whole repair takes only about a week and strikes are rare.
“By nature, wind power is more resilient,” Selyshchev said. “Of course you can destroy anything, but wind is more decentralized and so easier to secure.”
With 19 turbines installed, up from four at the start of the war, the Tyligulska Wind Power Plant produces 114MW. The remaining 64 turbines from Vestas Wind Systems A/S should be up and running by the end of next year, by which time DTEK hopes to have begun work on a further 650MW wind farm. That would account for about half the government’s plan to add 2 gigawatts (GW) of wind power to the grid.
This is power Ukraine needs.
The country had a total generating capacity of 25GW in 2021, reduced by occupation and destruction to 17GW today, Ukrainian Minister of Infrastructure Oleksiy Kuleba said in an interview at his Kyiv office. The country needs 15GW to 17GW to keep the heat on, which leaves very little buffer.
However, the experience of previous winter assaults has also built resilience, Kuleba said. About 1GW of Ukraine’s remaining output capacity has been decentralized to smaller, harder-to-destroy units, while many shops, offices and schools across the country have acquired backup generators. When heat is lost over the coming months, about 10,000 of these become “heat centers” to which people can go to stay warm.
Is that going to be enough to stop millions more Ukrainians fleeing West? Perhaps. The mere potential for a new, politically destabilizing wave of refugees forms part of Putin’s campaign to strike at that soft, allied underbelly with the threat of a much wider war. That is why he appeared on TV in military uniform for just the third time since the start of the war on Sunday, listening to Russian Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov report on Russia’s allegedly inexorable battlefield victories and boasting of a newly tested nuclear-powered, nuclear-capable cruise missile that has unlimited range and cannot be stopped.
It is hard to know if Putin’s latest wonder-weapon is in fact unstoppable, just as it is dubious he would risk nuclear war. Equally, as tough as the situation certainly is for Ukrainian troops, Russia has taken less than 1 percent of Ukraine’s territory at enormous cost since stopping Kyiv’s last successful counteroffensive in November 2022. And, as former Russian central banker Alexandra Prokopenko has said, Putin faces his own emerging strains at home.
Still, Gerasimov’s propagandistic claims of encirclements and the imminent collapse of Ukrainian forces along the front might prove to be self-fulfilling prophecies, should allies fail to provide their share of the means to fight this winter.
Putin’s message to the West is clear: Ukraine is losing anyway and we are ready for the ultimate war if anyone gets in our way; are you? The conclusion for leaders in the US and Europe to draw should be as clear: Whatever they are going to do, they need to do it decisively and now.
Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East. He was previously Istanbul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal. This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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