Ukraine continues its struggle to maintain the supply of electricity across the country, as Russia ramps up its aerial campaign, shifting the focus towards the destruction of power generation facilities. Ukraine’s remarkable energy sector resilience is attributed to multiple factors: redundancies in and adaptiveness of the power system, pre-invasion preparedness measures, and the capacity to restore damaged or destroyed facilities.
This report identifies and analyses some key lessons in physical protection, energy policy, cybersecurity, and strategic communication domains when ensuring the functioning of the power generation, transmission, and distribution system in wartime. It examines how Ukraine responded to the kinetic attacks against its power system. The report also outlines the protection and recovery policies and the practical measures implemented by its government, local authorities, and power companies. It then analyses the nature of cyber threats and how Ukraine has countered them during two distinct periods — in 2014-22 and 2022-24. It also shows how Ukraine mounted effective crisis and strategic communication efforts and dealt with the attempts by Russia and its proxies to use disinformation to undermine public self-confidence, trust, and cooperation — all while managing the consequences of the attacks against the power system.
The report argues that wartime resilience of power system requires active and sustained contribution from a broad range of stakeholders — domestic and foreign, civil and military, as well as governmental, corporate, and societal — and provides another convincing case of how valuable and important the whole-of-government and whole-of-society approaches are under such severe conditions, including in cyber and cognitive warfare domains. It outlines a set of recommendations for defence planners, energy policymakers, electricity producers, transmission and distribution system operators, cybersecurity managers, and strategic communicators that could be applied to enhancing the war preparedness of the power systems of NATO Allies.
Download and read: The Staying Power of Ukrainian Lights. Lessons of Wartime Resilience of the Electricity Sector (PDF)
This study was supported by a research grant provided by AS Elering. The views and opinions contained in this paper are solely those of its authors and do not necessarily represent the official policy or position of the International Centre for Defence and Security, AS Elering, or any other organisation.