Ukraine Seeks 1.3 GW of Flexible Power After Russia Guts Thermal Generation
Four years of Russian attacks have destroyed roughly 80% of Ukraine's thermal generation fleet, prompting a wartime reconstruction effort with lessons for European grid operators.
Four years after Russia's full-scale invasion began, a Montel analysis published on Wednesday (2026-07-29) by senior energy consultant Hubert Put assesses how Ukraine has kept electricity flowing despite a campaign designed to stop it. The picture that emerges is of a grid that has survived through decentralisation, improvisation, and emergency procurement — rather than any structural advantage.8
The scale of the damage sets the context. Russian missile and drone strikes have taken out roughly 80% of Ukraine's coal- and gas-fired generation, according to Economist reporting from May 2026 (2026-05-19). That is a near-total dismantling of the thermal backbone that Soviet-era planners built to power much of eastern Europe.1
The inheritance that Russia has spent four years erasing was considerable. By 1990, Soviet Ukraine was generating around 300 billion kilowatt-hours annually, among the largest outputs in Europe, and supplying the bulk of the Soviet Union's electricity exports to the continent, according to Atlantic Council data published in May 2026 (2026-05-28). Russia's war has targeted that capacity systematically.5
Nuclear infrastructure has not been spared. Ukraine's Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant went without external electricity for over a week, its longest such outage since the war began, according to reporting in the Independent from October 2025 (2025-10-01). On October 1, 2025, drones struck the decommissioned Chernobyl site, cutting power to the facility for more than three hours. Kyiv described that strike as a global threat to nuclear safety.6,3
The human cost of the grid crisis appeared in Economist reporting from May 2026 (2026-05-19). Residents of Vyshhorod, a town north of Kyiv, sat crowded into the local town hall on the fourth consecutive day without power, charging phones from what the publication described as spaghetti-like piles of extension cables. The scene illustrated the practical limit of resilience when generation itself has been systematically destroyed.2
Ukraine's response on the infrastructure side came in May 2026 (2026-05-26), when the government launched a tender for more than 1.3 GW of new flexible power capacity, targeting delivery by 2028. Analysts cited by Montel said the procurement would improve system resilience against further attacks and help manage peak consumption periods.4
The digital response has been quieter. Ukraine migrated state registries, tax records and critical government data to cloud servers hosted abroad, putting them beyond the reach of Russian missiles, according to Foreign Policy reporting from July 2026 (2026-07-16). A warhead could destroy a building in Kyiv; it could no longer destroy the records the state depends on to function.7
Atlantic Council analysis from May 2026 (2026-05-28) argued that Ukraine's combination of Soviet-era grid infrastructure and the operational flexibility developed under wartime conditions could serve as a reference point for European grid operators working on their own resilience planning. That framing is credible in principle, but transferring lessons from a war economy to regulated EU electricity markets involves complications the analysis did not fully resolve.5
The 1.3 GW tender is the nearest concrete milestone. Analysts at Montel called it gap-filling rather than gap-closing, a distinction that signals how much of the pre-war generation base remains offline. International financing has not yet been confirmed; the 2028 delivery date assumes a construction environment that continued Russian strikes on energy infrastructure may not permit. That gap between procurement ambition and ground reality is what the next heating season will expose.4,8