On the Ground With Crews Battling to Keep the Lights On in Ukraine
KYIV, Ukraine—It was late January, and an elite Ukrainian team grabbed their tools for a special operation critical to their country’s resistance against Russia: an underwater drone, a hammer and a chisel.
Their job was to repair a crack in a concrete structure at a power plant caused by a Russian missile strike. At risk was power and heating for thousands of homes in Ukraine’s capital. The challenge? The crack was underwater, and the repairs would have to take place as Russian missiles continued to land.
The team succeeded in a risky operation lasting six days, one of the most compelling examples of the courage and resilience of repair crews and power-station workers fighting night and day to keep the power and heat on as Russia seeks to destroy Ukrainian morale with relentless aerial attacks.
“It was definitely one of our hardest tasks ever,” said Andriy Vlasenko, the 45-year-old head of the dive team from the State Emergency Service.
Relentless Russian strikes with missiles and explosive drones have targeted Ukrainian power stations and electrical infrastructure, leaving most of the population with only a few hours of power a day, according to Ukrainian officials.
Russia’s attacks have taken a toll on energy workers, killing more than 160 in nearly four years of war, according to the Ukrainian Energy Ministry.
Russians often strike the same site twice in what Ukraine said is a “double tap” aimed at killing rescuers and repair crews. More than 100 emergency-service workers have been killed and more than 500 wounded since the invasion, Ukraine’s emergency service said.
The task for Vlasenko’s team of five divers at the power plant was especially perilous. They said they had to endure water temperatures of 35 degrees Fahrenheit, working in turns of no more than 40 minutes each. Access to the repair site required braving the water current and swimming through a narrow tunnel. They used the drone to illuminate the site and transmit video to colleagues so they could see the diver was safe.
They had to pause their work around eight times a day for air raids, with a warning transmitted to the diver by flashing the light on the drone three times.
They received state awards for their work, a far cry from one of their main winter occupations before the war: rescuing fishermen who had fallen through ice on the river.
There is a psychological toll as well as a physical one for the workers keeping the power on.
In early February, the power plant they had repaired was damaged again when Russia launched hundreds of drones and more than 70 missiles at Ukraine in its largest airstrike this year. The attack came just as a thaw gave way to extreme cold, and days after President Trump said he had asked Russian President Vladimir Putin to hold off on strikes for a week because of the frigid temperatures.
“Russia is now attacking without limits,” said Maxim Timchenko, chief executive of DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy company. “And yet Ukraine is doing what it has always done: fighting and surviving.”
It is a familiar dynamic to employees of DTEK at a thermal-power plant that has been struck by the Russians at least 10 times. When a Wall Street Journal team visited the plant recently following the latest bombardment, workers moved through soot-covered halls with flashlights to examine the severely damaged facility.
The manager of the boiler and turbine department and a half-dozen staff members had donned body armor and stayed in the control room to monitor the equipment during the attack. One strike brought plaster down on their heads; another ground the whole plant to a halt.
The manager ordered an evacuation. The workers ran downstairs and sprinted across a yard for the shelter. As they reached it, another strike hit.
The following morning, staff including those who were on leave turned up to try to do repairs.
“There’s nothing harder for a working person than seeing that the result of the work has been destroyed,” said the manager, who has worked at this station for 27 years.
Days later, snow was falling as workers were still pulling apart damaged equipment in temperatures indoors and outdoors of 14 degrees Fahrenheit.
Staff recalled the relentless destruction that Russia has wrought on their plant. The first attack in fall 2022 blew out windows and showered workers with glass. Further attacks damaged the roof, walls and equipment. They repaired the damage repeatedly, but Russia struck again, leading the workers to compare their situation to the film “Groundhog Day.”
“We repaired it, rebuilt it, launched it. Smoke rises from the stack,” said the head of the plant’s equipment unit. “Then boom—and we have to start all over again.”
After attacks on energy sites, electricians fan out across Kyiv for repairs. It is inherently dangerous work. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, 16 of DTEK’s workers have lost their lives while on shift and 113 others have been injured.
A dozen people, including nine DTEK workers, were killed Feb. 1, when two Russian drones targeted a bus transporting coal miners in eastern Ukraine. The second drone hit those escaping the damaged bus, as well as people helping them.
Oleksiy Brekht, the former head of Ukrenergo, the state-owned grid operator and one of the country’s foremost engineers, was killed in an accident while supervising energy-repair work at the site of a Russian strike last month.
On a recent day, a group of emergency energy engineers gathered at a transformer substation to carry out repairs after residents turned on all their equipment at once when power was restored, overloading the system.
It was just 3 degrees Fahrenheit, but Maksym Yevchun, the 35-year-old head of the team, worked without gloves. They toiled fast as they wanted to finish up before the next air raid sent them down to the nearest shelter.
Yevchun said he often replaces colleagues who call in sick or are exhausted by 12-hour shifts.
Much tougher, though, is the Sisyphean nature of his task.
“The hardest thing is when you do your job and it all gets destroyed,” he said.
The War in Ukraine
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