KYIV, Ukraine — Rolling blackouts are plaguing towns and cities across Ukraine after widespread Russian attacks this week that officials say damaged about 30 percent of the country’s electrical infrastructure.
While experts say the country had prepared for such strikes, officials have urged people to conserve energy, and it could be weeks before repairs to the system are finished. Many in the country — a supplier of electricity to Western Europe — believe that more must be done to secure the supply heading into winter.
Assaults on the country’s energy system continued on Wednesday, with reports of strikes on power infrastructure in Kamianske, an industrial city on the Dnipro River in eastern Ukraine.
“There is a serious fire and destruction; rescuers are taming the flames,” Valentyn Reznichenko, the head of the regional military administration, wrote in a statement on Telegram. “Then the power engineers will try to restore the equipment.”
The recent attacks damaged energy facilities in 12 regions and in the capital, Kyiv, President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his nightly address on Wednesday. He added that “the technical capability of electricity supply” had been fully restored in all but four regions, and thanked local officials and citizens for reducing energy consumption.
The mass strikes are the first time since the start of the war that Russian forces have targeted the energy infrastructure so broadly, officials say. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia described the attacks as retaliation for an explosion that brought down part of a bridge between Russia and Crimea and that he blamed on Ukraine.
Ukraine has been preparing as much as possible for a scenario in which energy infrastructure was targeted, by ensuring that extra equipment and other contingency plans are in place, officials say.
Power stations can operate independently, so the country can be “divided into islands of energy supply,” even when connections between them are damaged, noted Ivan Plachkov, a former energy minister for Ukraine.
The system has some resilience and some reserve, and it will be repaired, said Nataliya Katser-Buchkovska, an expert on the country’s energy system who is a former member of Ukraine’s Parliament and founder of the Ukrainian Sustainable Fund. “But we think it will take a few weeks.”
The government said it would halt energy exports after Monday’s strikes, disrupting a source of income that has been a boost to Ukraine’s economy during months of war.
Speaking to the boards of governors of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank on Wednesday, Mr. Zelensky asked for $57 billion to address the gloomy financial situation in Ukraine, including $2 billion allotted toward expanding exports to Europe and restoring energy infrastructure.
During the Soviet era in the 1970s and early ’80s, the country became a center of electrical generation. Numerous nuclear plants and coal plants were created, hydropower systems were developed and transmission lines were built to sell power to Western Europe.
In a typical year, before the pandemic shifted consumption habits, the country was producing nearly twice as much energy as was needed for domestic consumption, experts said, with much of that being sold to Europe.
Ukraine’s renewable energy sources have also been affected by the war. Twelve percent of its overall power supply used to come from renewables, like solar and wind power, Ms. Katser-Buchkovska said. But since the war began, and parts of the south and east have been besieged, that amount has been cut in half.
She said she hoped to see more resilient decentralized regeneration, allowing for more homes to have access to electricity even if their local power plant is knocked out, become part of those plans, as well as the use of more sustainable energy sources, to make the country less vulnerable to attacks.
“We need to rebuild not in an old-fashioned style, but to make it more efficient, more decentralized and sustainable,” she said. “Energy has always been used as a weapon by the Russian Federation, so when we are restoring and rebuilding we need to take that into account.”
Ben Shpigel contributed reporting.
