 Tim McDonnell/SemaforAs Ukraine struggles to rebuild its decimated energy system, among its obstacles are its allies. Last week, I visited one of the six fossil fuel power plants operated by the private Ukrainian energy company DTEK in territory held by Kyiv (the company has another two plants in Russian-occupied territory). All six have been heavily damaged by Russian missile and drone, and in some cases artillery, attacks. The one I visited — for security reasons, identifying details have to be concealed — has been attacked more than 10 times since last year, and has been shut off entirely since it was last hit with a barrage of rockets in May. Most of the plant’s turbine units are beyond repair. A mountain of coal sits unused outside its cavernous, hangar-like main building, constructed in the 1970s, when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union. The roof is gone. Inside is a three-story pile of charred, twisted metal draped in fallen insulation; splintered stairways and caved-in catwalks; enormous turbine shells and fuel silos pockmarked with shrapnel; sagging pipes, bits of rockets, and mounds of broken glass, all coated in ash. The huge axle of a train car sits incongruously across a second-floor walkway, thrown there from the rail line outside by an explosion. A long room where hundreds of kilometers of cables converged — and drew the raging fire along their length, during the attacks — resembles the blackened interior of a pizza oven. Russia’s attacks on energy infrastructure are forcing Ukraine to run its energy transition in reverse, dumping cash into the rebuilding of massive coal projects that would never fly in Europe or the US. And that tension has meant that even as Western capitals send weapons and aircraft to Kyiv in order to defeat an invading army, they could be hampering its efforts to rebuild critical infrastructure battered by those same forces. In some respects, Europe’s energy transition has proved a boon to Ukraine; the decommissioning of coal plants in Germany, Poland, and elsewhere has created a stockpile of parts that Ukrainian energy officials are now scouring. But that stockpile covers only about 20% of DTEK’s repair needs, Executive Director Dmytro Sakharuk told me. As a result, cash is needed, and even though experts agree that repairing existing coal plants is the simplest and cheapest way to restore Ukraine’s energy security before this coming winter, funds are constrained by the climate policies of Western donors and financial institutions that don’t want to underwrite increased use of coal, some officials warn.
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