Russia launches attacks Ukraine’s energy infrastructure almost every day. On Tuesday night, Russian bombs struck the city of Kharkiv, resulting in power cuts across three districts. , meanwhile, simultaneously damaged electricity and gas infrastructure in several different Ukrainian regions.
Russia has launched massive attacks on Ukraine’s electricity grid in recent years, but has yet to succeed in causing major power outages. Experts say that this fall, as the weather grows colder, Russia is targeting the Ukraine’s gas supply and pipeline network. The upcoming winter could become one of the hardest for Ukraine since .
Central heating systems have already been switched on in Ukraine’s Rivne, Lviv and Khmelnytskyi regions, as well as in the . It should be said that so far, however, only communal facilities are being supplied with heat. In Kherson, most households with their own boilers fired them up on October 1, while in the Kharkiv region, heaters won’t be switched until early November.
At the same time, there will be no district heating in some cities of the Kharkiv region, particularly in Kupyansk, as the head of the regional military administration Oleh Syniehubov told Ukrainian radio. This is due to targeted Russian attacks on energy facilities in the area.
Gas facilities under fire
Russian’s latest large-scale attacks paralyzed more than half of Ukraine’s gas production facilities, according to reports from US news outlet Bloomberg. Russian strikes on the Kharkiv and Poltava regions during the night of October 3, including 35 missiles and 60 drones, were among some of the most devastating ever, said Sergii Koretskyi, CEO of Ukraine’s state-owned oil and gas company Naftogaz.
“This is terrorism directed against civilian facilities that produce and process gas that is needed in people’s daily lives,” said Koretskyi. “This makes no military sense. This is yet another example of Russian perfidy and is aimed solely at disrupting the heating season and preventing Ukrainian households from being warm in winter.
Koretskyi said “a significant part of our facilities” had been damaged in recent attacks, with some of the damage being “critical.”
Russia aims to disrupt gas production
“The Russians want Ukraine to be cut off from gas,” Volodymyr Omelchenko, an energy expert at the Razumkov think tank in Kyiv, told DW. “We have to buy even more emergency equipment, because the enemy is now not attacking the gas supply but also the gas distribution networks.”
Speaking with US daily The Washington Post in September, Koretskyi said Russia had destroyed around 42% of daily gas production.
“Russia will do everything it can to prevent us from producing gas,” said at a press conference with Dutch Prime Minister Dick Schoof in early October. “It will be difficult to protect all of this [infrastructure].”
Zelenskyy nevertheless assured Ukrainians that they would not have pay more for gas.
“This winter, we will maintain a fixed gas price for private customers, there will be no price increases,” he said in a video address on October 7.
Can Ukraine afford additional gas imports?
Ukraine has almost fulfilled its initial plan of stockpiling gas for the winter. Recent Russian attacks on its gas supply and transportation system, however, have forced the government to revise its targets.
“We intend to increase our import capacity by another 30%, if possible,” Energy Minister Svitlana Hrynchuk said at a Kyiv briefing on October 7. “Everything will depend on how well we manage to rebuild everything. The faster our facilities are repaired, the fewer imports we will need.”
In August, Hrynchuk announced that Ukraine plans to stockpile 13.2 billion cubic meters of gas until the start of the heating season, of which 4.6 billion cubic meters would be imported. Yet researcher Omelchenko said Ukraine will be forced to secure additional gas imports now that many of its gas production facilities have been destroyed.
Omelchenko said even if authorities manage to pump 13.2 billion cubic meters of gas into underground silos by late October, as planned, this would not suffice. That’s why he expects Ukraine will need to buy an additional 2 billion cubic meters of gas.
“Increasing [gas] imports will require additional funds of up to $1 billion, which will have to be raised with the help of our partners,” he said.
Hrynchuk said Ukraine has the financial means to pay for its gas imports. After all, Ukraine has secured loans worth $500 million (€430 million) from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, as well as $300 million from the European Investment Bank for fuel purchases. Both loans are guaranteed by the European Commission.
Are price hikes inevitable?
While Ukraine must repay these loans sooner or later, it has for years refused to increase gas prices for private households. Analysts, however, say that without price hikes, energy suppliers will not be able to provide sufficient gas to Ukrainian households.
“Natural gas is purchased in Europe for 23,000 to 27,000 hryvnia (approx. €480 to €560) per thousand cubic meters,” Svyatoslav Pavlyuk of the Association of Energy Efficient Cities of Ukraine told DW. “The gas is passed on to households for 7,900 hryvnia including VAT; the difference is therefore 20,000 hryvnia and someone has to pay that.”
Pavlyuk said Ukraine previously mixed its own, cheaper gas with more expensive imported gas, thereby managing to get by. But now that more gas will have to be acquired from abroad, there should be no more illusions about cheap gas, he added.
“Local authorities cannot use their funds to repair the supply network, improve energy efficiency or switch to alternative fuels such as biomass or heat pumps. Instead, they have to pay for gas price differences,” said Pavlyuk.
These circumstances will likely force authorities to cut costs, for example by reducing the temperature of district heating. “Radiators won’t be as warm, you won’t freeze, but it will be colder than usual,” he said. “This is what our heating season will look like, though it will look different in different cities.”
Pavlyuk recommended that Ukrainians should prepare for possible power, gas or heating cuts.
This article was originally written in German.
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