Russian troops shut down Ukraine’s power plant, but workers have already been ‘grounded’.

Like the Russian forces forward in the Donetsk region of Ukraine at the fastest rate since the early days of its wide-scale offensive, moved to the city of Kurakhove and about two kilometers away from one of the country’s oldest thermal power plants.

Not long after the Kurakhove coal-fired power station opened in 1941, workers were forced to quickly dismantle part of it, with the goal of moving the vital infrastructure east before the Nazis swept in and took over.

This spring and last summer, as Russian troops approached, hundreds of workers regrouped in the area to pick up what they could and transport supplies to hot plants in the west that desperately needed spare parts after waves of Russian attacks.

“In fact, we ate people in Kurakhove,” said Pavlo Bilodid, who works in international communications at DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private company.

“It was a solution to save the equipment from further attacks and bring it to other thermal power plants in Ukraine.”

Attack waves

Since March of this year, Ukraine’s power grid has endured 11 major attacks by Russia. The most recent was on Thursday morning, when nearly 200 drones and missiles were targeted at locations across the country, leaving more than a million people without immediate power.

As temperatures drop as winter sets in, there is a threat of widespread power outages if extended cold spells are accompanied by additional waves of severe storms.

Throughout the war, which began when Russia attacked its neighbor in February 2022, almost half of Ukraine’s energy production capacity was destroyed, forcing energy workers to repair and continue working under constant threat.

In July 2023, three workers at the Kurakhove factory were killed when a roof collapsed, which Ukrainian authorities suspected of a Russian attack for months.

For the more than 600 employees employed at the facility, the ever-present threat escalated again in December 2023, when the facility’s director at the time, Anatoliy Borichevskiy, said it was being attacked by Russia almost daily.

“When the Russians saw the smoke from the chimney, which means that the factory has started working, they immediately exploded,” he said. “The situation was tense.”

Decision to terminate

During a Zoom interview with CBC News, Borichevskiy looked at his black book and said that between Dec. 5, 2023 and Jan. 17, 2024, this plant was attacked 38 times.

When the siren went off, some workers ran to the shelter, but others had to stay behind and continue running to the control area.

He said that for more than a month it was a bad cycle as the workers tried to fix it quickly, and they saw the factory hit again.

That changed in March, when Russian troops destroyed a railroad bridge that made it difficult to transport coal to the power plant. With the attacking troops seven kilometers away, it was too dangerous and pointless to try to repair the line.

At that time, the discussion was no longer about fixing the building but about saving what they could.

Borichskiy said he remembers well the day he met with the managers in this area and told them that everyone was about to be assigned to dismantle part of the facility. They will be removing critical equipment, including generators and transformers that were badly needed elsewhere – including five more thermal power plants run by DTEK, which were attacked by Russia.

“It was difficult,” said Borichevskiy, who has worked at the facility since 1992, when he was first hired as an electrician.

“Everyone understood that we could no longer work. The trial was imminent. It will not be silent.”

As more workers were brought in to begin work, the emerging issue was how to move the machines – which in some cases weighed several hundred tons – without being able to use the railroad.

Everything has to be loaded onto the trucks which means the bridges have to be tested to make sure they can carry the weight, and reinforced if they can’t.

Trucks and tractors were brought in to remove the equipment, as arrangements were made to evacuate workers and hire other power plants in Ukraine.

Russian soldiers are approaching

The city of Kurakhove, which grew in the shadow of a Soviet-era plant, had 18,000 residents before February 2022. In recent weeks as the Russians approached, those who remained in the city left and were evicted.

Borichevskiy moved in August, but about 100 employees remained at the facility until November.

Last week, Ukrainian officials said the plant had been bombed again, destroying its cooling towers.

Military analysts and Russian pro-war bloggers say the troops are now in Kurakhove. Russia’s Defense Ministry says it has taken control of the Nova Illinka settlement, one kilometer away, on the other side of Lake Kurakhove.

“This place has been destroyed,” said Borichevskiy, who was born and raised in this city.

“Everything there is very painful. I don’t know what will happen next. How will people be able to live there now that everything has been destroyed?”

A race to fix

DTEK’s focus now, along with all other energy users in Ukraine, is to protect the remaining power grid and try to reduce the time when large areas of the country go into darkness.

As of July, 90 percent of DTEK’s production capacity was destroyed. Since then, workers have worked to rebuild 60 percent, but they have arrived attack on November 17which killed in at least 11 people and do a lot of damage to the grid.

The US government and the European Commission recently announced that they will give $112 million to a private company to buy equipment, including transformers, to help restore power.

The managing director of the Energy Industry Research Center in Kyiv, Oleksandr Kharchenko, said that during the war all efforts were made to strengthen the energy facilities, especially the stations that are often attacked.

Work is underway to build concrete and steel buildings around it in an effort to protect against drones and missiles.

While Ukrainian cities are experiencing blackouts because there is no power or enough space, Kharchenko said, the system has responded to the Russian attack and will be able to handle the coming winter.

“Ukraine’s energy system has big challenges, but they are being fought over,” he said in an interview with CBC News. “I don’t think we’re going to have anything like an apocalypse or a major technological disaster.”

Although communities used to plan for power outages, many residents say this is still the case replaced by running generators and collecting battery packs to charge devices.

What’s not expected, Kharchenko said, is how cold it will be this winter: If temperatures drop to -10 or -15 C for more than a week, it seems that across Ukraine, there will be at least an average power outage. eight hours a day.