Russia destroys 60% of Ukraine’s gas production before winter

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A series of massive Russian air strikes last week knocked out nearly 60 percent of Ukraine’s gas production, raising fears of winter gas shortages, according to Ukrainian officials with knowledge of the damage.

The attacks prompted Ukrainian officials this week to call meetings with Western partners to inform them of the situation, the officials told the Financial Times.

Russia is again seeking to dampen morale with targeted strikes on energy infrastructure, as it has done every year since 2022, Sergei Koretsky, CEO of Naftogaz, the Ukrainian state energy company, said in an interview. Koretsky said the difference this time was in the frequency and scale of the attacks — with hundreds of drones and dozens of missiles almost every night.

He said the Kremlin’s goal was to “break our morale.” He added: “This has nothing to do with military needs, and none of these assets have any military value at all.”

He added that as a result of these attacks, “we need billions of cubic meters of gas during the heating season.”

Ukraine needed 13.2 billion cubic meters of gas for the winter before the October attacks, and Kiev was planning to import 4.6 billion cubic meters of gas by November 1 — “much more than in previous years,” Koretsky said.

He declined to provide a specific figure, but Ukrainian officials predicted that at the current pace of Russian attacks, Ukraine may need to buy about an additional 4.4 billion cubic meters of gas before March, or a fifth of the country’s annual use, at a cost of about $2.2 billion.

Russian forces have struck energy-related targets in the Chernihiv, Sumy and Poltava regions of northeastern Ukraine 160 times over the past month, President Volodymyr Zelensky told reporters on Wednesday.

Koretsky described the October 3 attack on facilities in the Kharkiv and Poltava regions as “the most massive and most aggressive attack since the start of the full-scale invasion.” He previously said that “a large part” of Naftogaz’s infrastructure was damaged in the attack, and described “some of the destruction” as extremely significant. A second major attack on gas infrastructure followed on Sunday, targeting gas storage facilities.

Maxim Timchenko, CEO of DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy company, told the Financial Times: “Our assets are under attack every day. Every day they destroy some pieces of equipment.”

Koretsky said that he spoke with the government of Ukraine with G7 ambassadors about the country’s needs during the winter. Kyiv has previously relied on foreign technical assistance and equipment to repair vital energy systems in the wake of the attacks. But more is needed as Russian bombing intensifies.

Koretsky said Kyiv urgently needs “more air defense systems.”

Russian drone strikes “are becoming more massive and more precise, and they are certainly using artificial intelligence,” Timchenko said. He added: “If they choose a target and send 50, 60 or 100 drones and missiles, it will be very difficult for our air defense to protect these facilities.”

He said DTEK did its best to protect low- and medium-voltage substations with concrete walls or sandbags.

Koretsky said Naftogaz did the same at its facilities. He showed the Financial Times pictures of large-scale defensive structures made of concrete and sand standing several meters high around their facilities.

“But it all depends, of course, on how much air defense equipment (Ukrainian air defense forces) has and, most importantly, whether it has ammunition,” Timchenko said.

Another critical need is additional equipment for repairs, including compressors and power transformers, Koretsky said. Koretsky said Kyiv’s goal is to create a “strategic reserve of such equipment.”

For its part, DTEK is investing heavily in onshore wind farms and battery storage to help build a more resilient energy grid. “For us, distributed and decentralized power generation is the best way to reduce the success of Russian attacks,” Timchenko said.