Several Ukrainian officials have warned that the country faces a harsh winter but is still victorious in the face of Russian missile attacks on its infrastructure.
Maxim Timchenko, chief executive of major power company DTEK, said he believed “the Russians have no chance of darkening Ukraine”.
However, he told a Kiev security forum on Friday that there were insufficient power generation and transmission problems.
In the capital, he said, the company was trying to introduce a “rolling controlled blackout: 3-4 hours of power supply followed by a 4-hour break. We hope this will continue into next week, if there are no further attacks. But We are ready for further attacks.”
He said all six of DTEK’s power stations had been attacked, some of them multiple times. As of Friday, the company had managed to bring them all back to the grid, he said.
Furthermore, he said: “We managed to build up enough coal stocks for the country, not just for our company. We have enough gas storage to generate electricity using natural gas. So we have enough capacity for the entire country.”
The problem, though, Tymchenko said, is connectivity and transmission.
“Transformers, substations, high-voltage transformers: these are what we have been lacking and what we have appealed to our international partners. Some equipment is already on its way to Ukraine,” he said.
Kiev was almost completely without power last week, Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko said. “There was no heat and no water. About 4,000 utility employees worked around the clock to restore them.”
Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov told the forum that the next few months will be difficult.
“The enemy still has significant resources, but there are growing signs that he needs to pause at all costs,” he added.