Sometimes there is one development that just dominates the news, but sometimes what jumps out is an obscure stat that explains a great deal and points the way to the future.
The Ukrainian national power company DTEK – these are the guys responsible for some energy production and pretty much all electricity distribution across the country – came out with a press release a couple of days ago that went far to clearing up all the speculation and noise and angst about Russia’s bombardment of Ukraine’s power grid. Parts of the info I have been able to reference has checked out and I have no reason to disbelieve it. For the first time, we have hard information on how effective Russia has been at blowing up Ukrainian power stations.
Russians Repurpose Old Underground Submarine Base in Crimea for Military Use
According to DTEK, since the start of the war, Russian strikes have taken an individual Ukrainian thermal power plant completely offline 49 times. According to DTEK counts, in 2024, Russia conducted major, massed strikes against the thermal plant portion of Ukraine’s power grid 10 times, and another three major strikes were conducted against other portions of the grid, particularly power distribution centers. Since the start of the invasion, in all those strikes, individual thermal plants have been targeted more than 200 times. The upshot of this was summer 2024 when 90% (!) of Ukraine’s thermal power production capacity had been destroyed.
Anecdotally anyone in Ukraine can confirm this because of big power cuts across the country. Where I was, lights were off from 8-14 hours a day, roughly, in July and August.
As an aside, since the Russians destroyed the Kakhovka hydroelectric plant, Ukraine has used nuclear power for the bulk of its electricity production. Pre-war it was about 55%, but once Russia started targeting power stations, it probably (my guess) has risen at times to above 80%. Since Ukraine isn’t Afghanistan or Vietnam (for instance), this is a big manufacturing problem because Ukraine has a lot of industry; and when the power shuts off, then manufacturing stops. The upshot of that is that thermal power plants are the buffer between minimum electricity and normal electricity. Hydroelectric used to be another base stream of power Ukraine could always rely on, but now it’s much less.
As fast as the Russians blow up the grid the Ukrainians are fixing it.
How many and how often thermal plants are online aren’t even just Ukrainian national security, they determine whether millions of people have not just light, but water and power in their homes. So besides the warfighting angle, there is the national morale angle. Try convincing voters that Russia can be stopped if the voters are sitting in dark apartments night after night for a couple of months.
It’s appropriate here to mention that among all the people the Russian strikes have killed and injured, four DTEK workers have died and 56 have been injured. Out of a workforce of about 4,000 responding to the Russian strikes, that’s a casualty rate safer than in the infantry, but more dangerous than in a long-range drone unit.
The key statistic however is this: of the 25 or so thermal power stations taken completely offline by Russian missile (or a lot more rarely) drone strikes this year, 20-plus were repaired and placed again back online. Pretty much, as fast as the Russians blow up the grid the Ukrainians are fixing it. Even as you read this, we can be positive that there are Ukrainian crews out there running lines and building blast walls and swapping out power boxes and so on, to recover from the last strike and prepare for the next one. It would be a lot worse if the Russians struck more often – but they can’t.
As I’ve mentioned before, the Russians in their studies of WWII seem not to have paid much attention to the US/British bombing campaigns of Germany and Japan, which proved pretty decisively that not only is it almost impossible to bomb civilians into submission, but also, that in almost all cases, the damage air strikes do against infrastructure will be repaired faster than the side launching the strikes can accumulate damaging hits. Over time, the same targets get hit and repaired over and over and that’s obviously what’s going on with the Russian bombardment of Ukraine’s power grid.
One indicator that the Russians are locked into a bombing campaign that won’t work is the number of aircraft they’re able to put into the air for one of these big strikes, which typically works out to about 15-20 bombers and probably about the same number of support aircraft. Once or twice a month. This is well-documented on both sides. How anyone can take Russia seriously as a major military power with a sortie rate like that is beyond me. But the point is, Winter 2024–25 was the time frame when Russia was going to pound Ukraine’s power grid into submission – remember all those “Frozen Winter!” headlines? Wasn’t there supposed to be a Ukraine power apocalypse right about now?
Well, maybe that was the Russian aspiration, but with less than two dozen bombers flying strikes at best every 20 days, and the DTEK guys working like beavers and (I hear) well-equipped by Western states with spare parts, back-up generation capacity etc., here I sit in a warm apartment, in Kyiv, in the middle of January. The lights are on, the internet works, and just yesterday the Russians hit Kyiv with a pair of ballistic missiles. Right about 6 a.m. The lights never went off where I was, never even flickered.
Which is another thing to consider from the point of view of the Ukrainian man or woman in the street. In that strike, there were apparently four Iskander missiles of which two were intercepted and two got through. The target, the Russian Defense Ministry says, was the Luch factory, which among a lot of other stuff makes missiles and missile components with which the Ukrainians have been bombarding the Russians back. This was not the first time the Russians had targeted Luch and although it would be inappropriate for me to discuss actual damage, only a moron would think that after three years of war, Luch management would leave its production lines on the surface where Russian missiles might hurt them. But three people died and another 10 were injured.
Anyway, one of the intercepted missiles hit right by the entrance of the Lukyanivka Metro Station, rubbled up the side of the building, and did some surface damage to a McDonald’s restaurant in the building. This is a pretty well-known site, as it’s a metro station used by a lot of people working in the Ukrainian defense sector, and also, there are all manner of shops and small and medium businesses in the area. This was where the very first McDonald’s opened in Ukraine back in the 1990s. If you’re looking for a US parallel, it’s not a perfect analogy, but generally, maybe think Pentagon City metro station, just outside of Washington DC.
The Ukrainians had most of the debris cleared up and Lukyanivka Station back online in less than six hours, by 11:56 a.m. according to the news reports.
For fun, there is this question: “If a ballistic missile detonated next to the entrance of Pentagon City metro station and killed three and injured 10 Washingtonians, how long would it be before the Americans got things cleaned up and opened up at that station for business again?”
Image of one of the Pentagon City metro entrances for reference.
But more seriously, the DTEK data is very solid evidence that the Russian bombardment campaign against Ukraine’s power grid is a failure and will continue to fail, because the Ukrainian power grid and the people are resilient. So, the questions to ask are whether that will percolate up to Putin, and, parallel with that, how long will the Russians keep on firing off missiles because it’s easier to pretend they are beating the hapless Ukrainians into submission, in the hope that Americans and Europeans with influence will find that narrative politically convenient?
More prisoners than usual
Although that’s a pretty upbeat headline I don’t want to give you the idea things are great at the front. Actually, the past week has seen journalists, MPs, retired officers, and serving officers all go public with various pieces of the long-running complaint that the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) suffers from many, many bad leaders, and that is getting good soldiers killed and causing Ukraine to lose ground. The pace of the fighting has dropped off somewhat and over the last week Russian ground gains have been close to, but not quite nil.
Whether this means the AFU has fought the Russian winter offensive to a halt or that the Russians are just taking a breather, or just it’s the soldiers tired of the cold and the wet and they themselves have decided to rest, we’ll see.
But over this past week we’ve seen the AFU put in small counter-attacks of their own – which is not completely new – but this time they’ve netted more Russian prisoners than usual. Whether this is brilliant initiative or a sea-change in tactics or the first domino of Russian army global morale or just coincidence, I can’t say. But most war weeks, if the AFU is doing well, there are a half dozen Russian POWs gathered in, almost always in an isolated battle, and this week it looks to be 35-40, in at least three separate engagements.
One fight took place in the Kursk region, where Ukrainian drones video-recorded Russian troops overrunning a Ukrainian position, pulling Ukrainian soldiers out of their holes and then shooting two Ukrainians dead after they surrendered.
The story continued when Ukrainian special operations troops, supposedly one of the new ranger units, crossed lines to the now Russian positions and killed several Russians and took five prisoners who, perhaps unsurprisingly, turned out to be very forthcoming to their captors about details of the incident.
It turned out the unit was Russia’s 40th Arctic Brigade – this is another one of those far-flung Russian “elite” specialist units that got thrown into the war back in late 2022. One Russian even admitted to shooting the Ukrainians, but said he was following orders. So that is one Russian service member who will become very familiar with the Nuremberg principle. Here’s the official video.
Two contacts in the sneaky-deaky-pointy-beakie special ops community confirmed the raid’s authenticity to me, but later the SSO itself published a video with some operators talking on camera. It was 8th Special Operations Regiment who do, in fact, perform ranger missions. In this case it was wait until bad weather and sneak into the Russian positions and wake up sleeping soldiers with a rifle muzzle.
The same day (Jan. 16), our buddies in the Air Assault, tentatively elements of 82nd and 95th Brigades, announced they had captured 27 Russian soldiers in fighting in the Kursk region, and to prove it, lined them up and made each man state his name, home region and unit to the camera.
Some were from the very beat-up 810th Naval Infantry, one or two (I forget) was from the equally damaged 155th Naval Infantry, and most of the remainder were from “elite” airborne units like the 76th Paratrooper Division and 83rd Air Assault Brigade. All of these are “Guards” units. There were a lot of guys from Bashkortostan, two from Crimea, only a couple from central Russia, one or two from the Far East, and none from urban Petersburg or Moscow.
The video doesn’t make clear where and how the captures took place, but open sources have placed Ukrainian air assault units on the eastern face of the Kursk salient, and there are FPV strike videos to back that up. As to how, I dunno, take a look at the POWs: 27 captured and only one wounded. So I’m inclined to guess the air assault guys launched a surprise attack and overran a Russian company position. All sources say the front in the Kursk region has stalled for at least a week, no serious movements of lines. That is the sort of lull aggressive units can take advantage of, and the Ukrainian air assault units have a record of aggressiveness.
Anyway, this is the biggest capture of Russians since the August invasion of Russia when about 200 Russian border troops and conscript soldiers surrendered rather than fight. Pic attached of the line-up.
Finally, Friday, according to reports, seven Russian soldiers were captured by a single soldier from the 71st Jaeger Brigade in the northeastern Vovchansk sector. According to one Russian soldier’s account, they had been loaded onto an MTLB tracked carrier and told to go fight the Ukrainians, but the MTLB was destroyed by Ukrainian fire. The Russians either ran out of ammo or lost their personal weapons, but in either case were searching for cover and entered a basement in a ruined building. There they encountered an armed Ukrainian from the 71st Jaeger Brigade – a formation in the air assault troops, by the way – who took them prisoner. Deep State says lines there haven’t moved much for at least two months.
A ceasefire in 24 hours. Well, if talking about it counts as getting it done…
Testimony has begun of the Trump administration’s key players in whatever future US policy towards Ukraine might be, like Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense and Marc Rubio as Secretary of State.
As to Hegseth, I am on record elsewhere as his being a lightweight not even close to having the chops needed to run the DoD. I watched his entire testimony and saw nothing to change my view. He said little about Ukraine and what he did say was either misleading or inaccurate. Kyiv Post fact-checked his testimony, you can read the fact-check here:
As to Rubio, he repeated the possibly inaccurate narrative that Ukraine is facing an existential manpower crisis that must force it to a ceasefire and concessions.
He is clearly much better informed and Washington-capable than Hegseth and, since he’s on track to be the US’s top diplomat, I expect him neither to state the full truth nor to say anything that would not advance his government’s US foreign policy objectives. So unlike Hegseth, who among other things, argued he would be great at DoD because he’s so inexperienced and therefore would bring a fresh look to DoD structural problems, Rubio’s performance was professional and his spin “sounded” a lot more reasonable. At another point, asked if he thought Ukraine should be in NATO, he said “maybe not,” after all, it’s currency for negotiations like everything else.
Sounds reasonable, right? Well, saying stuff like that may well get him approved for the job, but telling Congress something in testimony isn’t the same thing as getting an international agreement tied down. We all know the Ukrainian position down to the fine print on this, because they keep repeating it:
- Ukraine will fight rather than agree to a ceasefire without ironclad security guarantees for Ukraine, because without credible, real deterrence Russia will attack again.
- Ukraine is willing to talk options, but right now the only visible way to prevent another Russian invasion of Ukraine is Ukrainian membership in NATO, because Russia is afraid of a war with NATO.
- Ukraine will not take America’s or anyone else’s word that things will just work out. Ukraine agreed to give up nuclear weapons on precisely that promise from the US and Russia in 1994. Now Russia has invaded Ukraine, and the US is pressuring Ukraine to give Russia Ukrainian territory. A ceasefire in the hope that things will work out is an existential threat to Ukrainian statehood and, to go by threats from more than a few in the Kremlin, the survival of Ukrainians as a people.
The view in Kyiv is that either the incoming US administration is badly informed of the Ukrainian position, in which case, they will learn. Or the alternate interpretation is that the incoming US administration, with Rubio leading the diplomacy, calculates it can cajole the Ukrainians into signing away their national security. In that case, the Americans will learn the Ukrainians won’t do that.
In the Ukrainian media, overseas reports that a ceasefire is in the offing and that European peacekeepers might soon arrive look mostly farcical.
As to where the winds of ceasefire rumors might actually be blowing, the biggest news in Ukraine right now about that is the secret-but-now-all-over-the-media exercise France conducted, called the Perseus exercises, during which more than 3,000 French special operations soldiers trained deploying to forested and wet terrain, leading to some speculation that there is a clever plan out there for big NATO states to come into Ukraine to be peacekeepers and the French were going to take the Belarusian border. Units named were the 13th Parachute Regiment, the 1st Marine Parachute Regiment, and the 4th Special Forces Helicopter Regiment.
But those theories got shot down pretty quickly because, after all, the Ukrainian army is about three times the size of the French army in its entirety, and something like 250 times bigger than all the French soldiers infantry, helicopter crew, truck drivers, soup cooks and band members, commandos and media outreach officers, the lot of them, that were involved in the “secret” Perseus mission.
The Russian army deployed vs. Ukraine is about 40-50% bigger than the Ukrainian army. The big battalion reporting viz. France has sometimes been tied to reports from Britain that, for the first time since the Napoleonic Wars, the entire British army – which theoretically would also participate in a peacekeeping force in Ukraine – has fallen below 75,000 soldiers and that if Britain were to push it they might be able to send four proper combat brigades somewhere. Zelensky the other day said that the AFU has “more than” 100 frontline combat brigades, not counting support formations like artillery, recon and drones.
So in the Ukrainian media, overseas reports that a ceasefire is in the offing and that Trump will cut a deal with Putin in a day, and that European peacekeepers might soon arrive look mostly farcical. It’s like the foreigners are blissfully ignorant of the scale of the war going on in Ukraine, or the stakes involved, and have even less of an understanding of what a viable foreign military contingent deployed to Ukraine might look like.
Image attached of Charles De Gaulle, a European politician who felt Europe’s military capacity to deploy force needed to be credible and independent, but above all credible.
Meanwhile, for the past few days in Ukraine, the big news was that over the weekend the Ukrainians managed for the first time to set four major Russian oil refineries on fire simultaneously, and the drone strike people say drone production will accelerate.
Reprinted from Kyiv Post’s Special Military Correspondent Stefan Korshak’s blog. You can find the original here.
The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.
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