The price of light
As Russia pounds Ukraine’s power grid with a brutality unseen since Stalin and Hitler, energy workers risk death to fend off the darkness
Heavy Russian shelling forced the closing last spring of the Kurakhove Thermal Power Plant, shown here in July 2023, when one of its seven power units remained operational. In recent days, the southeastern city of Kurakhove appears to have fallen to Russian troops. (c. Martin Kuz)
The white pickup truck shuddered along a dirt road toward a town drained of life and light. Before Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, 8,500 people lived in Mala Danylivka, a commuter suburb 5 miles from the eastern city of Kharkiv. Three-fourths of them fled at the war’s outset, and as the enemy closed in and heavy shelling battered the power grid, the town descended into darkness.
Ukrainian troops reclaimed the area in April that year, and soon after, the Kharkiv utility company dispatched a three-man crew to the settlement. Twin brothers Hryhoriy and Yevhen Zubenko and their coworker, Oleksandr Kotlyar, set off in the pickup to repair damaged transformers and distribution lines.
Gray smoke from artillery fire smeared the morning sky in the near distance as they headed north out of the city, passing through a series of military checkpoints. Russian forces had occupied parts of Mala Danylivka, and approaching the outskirts, Hryhoriy turned down a rutted dirt lane that cut through a field. There the day went black.
A Russian anti-tank mine detonated beneath the truck with a furious roar. The engine erupted in flames as glass and metal ripped through the cab. Hryhoriy absorbed the worst injuries — shattered legs and shrapnel wounds from his eyes to his feet. The blast broke Oleksandr’s leg as he sat in the front passenger seat, and all three men suffered concussions and ruptured eardrums.
Yevhen staggered out from the back seat to extract his brother and Oleksandr from the wreckage. The explosion destroyed the trio’s cellphones, so Yevhen and a hobbled Oleksandr draped Hyrhoriy’s arms over their shoulders and carried him to a checkpoint a half-mile away. He endured 20 surgeries over the next year to regain his vision and ability to walk.
The Zubenko twins, 25, recalled their fateful trip when I met them at the utility company’s offices last summer. Hryhoriy started a new role as a dispatcher after he recovered; Yevhen moved up to crew foreman a year ago. (Oleksandr also came back.) The brothers never gave serious thought to quitting, motivated by a dual devotion to coworkers and country.
“A lot of people have more dangerous jobs,” said Hryhoriy, whose reduced eyesight prevents him from returning to the field. “We are not soldiers, military medics, ambulance drivers.” Yevhen smiled as he added a caveat. “But you have to be a little crazy.”
Their modesty belies the lethal risk borne by Ukraine’s energy workers. Russia’s pummeling of the power grid — including 13 large-scale attacks and some 250 sporadic strikes last year — has killed more than 100 workers and wounded hundreds of others. In three separate barrages between mid-November and Christmas Day, Russia fired 700 missiles and drones at energy facilities across Ukraine, killing three workers and scores of emergency responders, police officers and civilians.
Twin brothers Yevhen (left) and Hryhoriy Zubenko, workers with the Kharkiv utility company, were wounded in April 2022 by a Russian anti-tank mine. The device exploded beneath their vehicle as they drove to a village to repair its damaged power grid. (c. Martin Kuz)
Russia has robbed Ukraine of almost two-thirds of its energy generation capacity during the course of the war, destroying or seizing hydroelectric, thermal and nuclear power plants and substations. The diminished supply of gas and electricity jeopardizes millions of Ukrainians struggling to survive winter’s wrath, with utility operators forced to impose rolling blackouts and many rural areas cut off from the grid. The United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency further warn that Russia’s attacks could trigger a nuclear disaster.
The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants last year for four top Russian military officials over the sustained targeting of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. The court’s prosecutors filed charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity after determining that Moscow carried out a “campaign of strikes” as a matter of “state policy.”
Seeking to cripple Ukraine’s energy production, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has resurrected the scorched-earth strategy of two despots who ravaged the country in World War II. When Adolf Hitler sent German forces into western Ukraine in June 1941, Soviet ruler Joseph Stalin directed the Red Army — its unprepared troops in full retreat — to lay waste to villages and cities alike to impede the Nazi advance.
Stalin ordered the destruction of “all valuable materials, energy and agricultural stocks, and standing grain that cannot be taken away and can be used by the enemy,” as author Karel Berkhoff recounted in Harvest of Despair. Soviet soldiers dynamited power plants and flooded coal mines. The most horrific act of mass sabotage occurred in southern Ukraine, where without warning Stalin’s secret police blew up what was then Europe’s largest hydroelectric dam, located on the Dnipro River. The ensuing deluge killed an estimated 20,000 to 100,000 civilians and Red Army personnel.
The Nazis gained control of the country in the final weeks of 1941 and began rebuilding the dam. Two years later, with Soviet troops on the offensive, the Germans breached the massive barrier as part of a border-to-border demolition of Ukraine while withdrawing westward. In ordering a retreat, Nazi military commander Heinrich Himmler told his troops, “The enemy must find a country totally burned and destroyed.” A National Geographic correspondent, traversing “liberated Ukraine” for a report published in May 1944, described a lightless land in utter ruin.
“Hundreds of the Ukraine’s pretty little villages have been burned or blasted from its rich earth,” Eddy Gilmore wrote. “…Realizing full well the part power plays, the Germans consistently went for the lighting plants whenever they were forced from the cities. ...Kharkov and Kiev, the two biggest cities of the Ukraine, did not have a power plant left, a bulb burning, a streetcar running, or hardly an electric wire left intact after the Germans left.”
Ukraine needed decades to rebuild following the wartime depredations of Stalin and Hitler. Eight million of its people died in WWII, including 2.5 million soldiers conscripted to serve under Stalin, who a decade earlier had killed at least 4 million Ukrainians in a manmade famine. The reconstructed dam on the Dnipro resumed operation in 1950 and remained in normal working condition until last spring, when Russian missiles struck one of its two power stations (video). The damage reduced its generation capacity by a third, and repairs will take three years to complete — barring future attacks.
Left: Volodymyr Klymchuk, a district manager with the Kharkiv utility company, stands beside transformers destroyed by Russian shelling. Right: Workers repair utility lines damaged by Russian artillery in the settlement of Lisne in summer 2024. (c. Martin Kuz)
Two years ago, Russian soldiers sabotaged a different hydroelectric dam on the Dnipro, unleashing a flood that summoned grim memories of the terror Stalin inflicted in 1941. The rising waters submerged entire villages and displaced 40,000 people, and the loss of the dam deprived southern Ukraine of a vital power source. (The Russians control territory in the affected area, thwarting Ukraine’s efforts to tally and collect the dead. An AP investigation estimated hundreds perished.)
Putin’s assault on infrastructure serves malign, intertwined ambitions: to drive more people from the country and deter those who have fled from returning. Energy workers counter his brutality with day-to-day persistence.
“You need light to have life,” said Volodymyr Klymchuk, a district manager with the Kharkiv utility company. For the past three years, he has slept most nights on a cot in a room behind his office, seldom able to break away to spend time with his teenage daughter. “After a few days, if there is no electricity, that is the reason for people leaving. When the light comes back, they come back.”
Volodymyr has observed the cycle of exodus and influx in towns and villages throughout his district. The area extends from Kharkiv’s northern edge to the Russian border and bears deep scars from three years of relentless shelling and periods of enemy occupation.
In Slatyne, a settlement 15 miles outside the city and 5 miles from Russia, the prewar population of 6,000 fell below 500 when the invasion began. Two months later, after Russian troops retreated from the vicinity, utility crews started to mend the tattered grid, lifting the town out of darkness. The next six months brought the return of more than 1,500 residents, most of them pensioners lacking the means and stamina to move elsewhere.
“Electricity is like fresh air for a village,” Volodymyr said. “People feel like they have their life again.” He oversees a staff of 56 employees, down from 70 before the invasion; some workers joined the military, others resettled abroad. His crews have repaired or replaced 150 miles of distribution lines and 1,300 utility poles, restoring power as many as a dozen times in villages bombed again and again.
A Russian airstrike killed three people in Slatyne in September, and a fourth died in an attack last month. The decision of residents to stay in or return to decimated areas can appear suicidal from afar. Volodymyr views their choice as evidence of the same imperishable spirit that sustained Ukrainians in the era of Stalin and Hitler. “If the land is in Ukraine’s control, we want to make it so people can live there,” he said. “This is our home.”
He travels to settlements under fire or recently freed from occupation before sending out his crews. Shadowed by thoughts of the blast that wounded the Zubenko brothers and Oleksandr, he reminds line workers that they can decline a job at any time, no questions asked and no shame conveyed. None have refused an assignment even as all have withstood gunfire and shelling in the field.
The Zubenkos and Oleksandr received the Order For Courage from President Volodymyr Zelensky several months after surviving the explosion in Mala Danylivka. The award honors soldiers and civilians for selfless acts in defense of Ukraine’s territory and sovereignty. At my request, and with sheepish reluctance, Yevhen pulled out his phone to show me a photo of him shaking hands with the president. “It was nice but not necessary,” he said. “Things happen in war.”
The brothers learned that cruel lesson as teenagers in 2014, when they and their parents were forced to abandon the family’s home in the southeastern region of Luhansk. Putin began his invasion of Ukraine that spring, annexing Crimea and dispatching troops in unmarked uniforms to Luhansk and the adjacent Donetsk region to foment a separatist uprising.
Russian troops pulverized large swaths of Luhansk and Donetsk in the eight years before Putin expanded his war and its devastation. The widespread damage to the national energy grid — gutted power plants, shattered dams, severed utility lines — has shrouded Ukraine in a darkness unseen since the Nazis retreated 80 years ago.
Putin’s revival of a tyranny both Hitlerian and Stalinist almost ended Yevhen’s and Hryhoriy’s young lives three years ago. They take benevolent revenge through their work, providing light for their fellow Ukrainians to fend off the Russian night.
“We have very bad luck with this neighbor,” Yevhen said. “They bring us only death and suffering.” His brother nodded. “In Ukraine, we value life. That is the difference.”
Etc.
— President-elect Donald Trump has tapped three veterans who served in America’s “forever wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq for roles in his administration. JD Vance, Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Hegseth frame Trump’s “America first” isolationism as a principled corrective to the country’s post-9/11 military misadventures. But their opposition to U.S. support for Ukraine lays bare a worldview without a moral compass. I recently wrote about that looming betrayal for The Hill.
— My sincere thanks for reading. If you’re a paid subscriber, please share your thoughts below. And if you’re not, I hope you’ll consider upgrading — paid subscriptions make this newsletter possible. You can also support my self-funded reporting here if you prefer to make a one-time donation. Thank you.
Those cute twins! They look so unscathed after what they went through. This really brings home what the power/utility crews in Ukraine are up against. Thanks for this.