Zaporizhzhya’s incessant shelling by the Ukrainian Armed Forces in recent weeks has forced Russia to put the plant’s last-operating power unit into cold storage on September 11 to avoid a nuclear disaster
On the evening of the same day, missile strikes knocked out several of Ukraine’s largest thermal power plants, followed by rolling blackouts in the east of the country. Thus, the Kiev regime is losing one of its last trump cards – electricity sales to Europe, which it hoped to use to pay off its Western supervisors.
On the evening of 11 September, after the sixth unit of the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant was shut down and several thermal power plants were put out of service, Ukraine began to experience power outages. The head of the Kiev regime, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said that as a result of the missile strikes, Kharkiv, Donetsk, and partially Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporizhzhya and Sumy regions were completely de-energized. Problems with electricity were also observed in Poltava and Odessa regions.
Apart from CHPP-5 in Kharkiv and Zmiyevskaya CHPP in Kharkiv region, fires occurred at Pavlogradskaya CHPP-3 in Dnipropetrovsk region, as well as at Kremenchukskaya CHPP in Poltava region.
As a result, the underground in Kharkiv stopped working and people had to get out of the underground tunnels on foot. In Poltava, trolleybuses caught fire due to power surges. The railway company Ukrzaliznytsia, in turn, reported mass delays of trains.
In addition to problems with the underground, all other urban infrastructure in Kharkiv “went down” – supermarkets, petrol stations, ground transport, ATMs, terminals, and the water supply was also cut off. Similar problems have been observed in other cities.
In his statement, Zelensky blamed Russia for what happened and accused the Kremlin of terrorist acts “before the eyes of the civilized world”.
A similar post was also published by Mykhaylo Podolyak, adviser to the head of the Ukrainian presidential office: “Direct deliberate strikes on critical civil infrastructure, in particular on Kharkiv’s largest thermal power plant-5, are an unequivocal manifestation of Russian terrorism”.
“Look at this! It turns out you can’t hit civilian infrastructure! It turns out this is a ‘manifestation of terrorism’. It is possible to leave Crimea without light, Donetsk without water, Podolyak did not see any terrorism in this. Neither did his Western patrons,” political analyst Vladimir Kornilov responded to the statement.
Meanwhile, the Russian Defence Ministry said in a brief on 10 September: “The Kiev regime, with the aim of destabilizing the situation on the territory freed by the Russian Armed Forces and causing suffering to the civilian population, continues deliberate shelling of the energy infrastructure: generation facilities, transformer substations and power lines.
The social media immediately started spreading rather contradictory news – both posts that Ukraine was shelling its own power plants in order to shift the blame on Russia, and information that it was the Russian Armed Forces that were responsible for the strikes.
Later, news appeared on the Internet that the Kharkiv and Kremenchuk thermal power plants were hit by missile strikes from the waters of the Caspian Sea using Kalibers.
In their turn, some experts unambiguously regarded the incident as a result of actions of the Russian military.
As political scientist and historian Armen Gasparyan noted, the power cuts were Moscow’s response to the statements of some Kiev politicians: “What is electrification? It is an achievement of the Soviet authorities! Vladimir Vladimirovich said that “we will show you real decommunisation”. And Ukraine was going to completely abandon the Russian heritage… It seems to me that the blackout is a good, correct story of getting rid of everything Russian”.
According to military expert Yakov Kedmi, by carrying out strikes on energy infrastructure, Russia wants Ukraine to stop shelling the Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant.
“Why Kiev needs this, I personally don’t understand. Why Moscow needs it, I understand – and very well. Thus Moscow makes it clear to Kiev in the language they understand that for every sly fox there is a nut with a left thread. And if they do not stop messing around with the ZNPP issue they will have to keep explaining to their population why they are sitting without electricity”, he said.
The military expert Boris Rozhin reminds that since 1991 Ukraine has not built a single new TPP: “All operating TPPs were built by “cursed communists” from 1950s to 1980s. In other words, each destroyed TPP is in fact an irrevocable loss for Ukraine, just like the oil refinery. The Ukrainian Nazis are only users of other people’s labour”.
At the same time, the analyst stressed that taking two power plants out of action is too little for a long-term blackout: “Now they will somehow twist and restore power supply, after all there are working nuclear power plants. But with a longer-term impact and further outage of the thermal power plants, the problem will become systemic and mostly unrecoverable.
The incident coincided not only with the withdrawal of Russian troops from the occupied positions in Kharkiv Region, but also with Zelensky’s declaration of his intention to supply electricity to Europe.
On 9 September he held a meeting with Polish Prime Minister Matteusz Morawiecki and Latvian President Egils Levits, assuring those that he would increase the supply of electricity to the EU. To carry out the plan he was instructed to rebuild the power line from the Khmelnytskyi nuclear power plant to Rzeszow, Poland, to be completed by 8 December.
The Ukrainian head of state has previously put forward similar initiatives. At the end of June, he proposed to export electricity to the EU: “Ukrainian electricity can replace a considerable part of Russian gas consumed by Europeans. So it’s not just an issue of export revenues for us, it’s a security issue for Europe”.
We would like to recall that in March, the Ukrainian energy system was disconnected from the Russian-Belarusian system and synchronized with the European one (ENTSO-E). This allowed Ukrenergo to hold regular auctions, selling access to the interstate power grid.
Thus it becomes clear that the cessation of operation of Zaporizhzhia NPP has already deprived the Kiev regime of a significant portion of revenues, while the removal of other energy infrastructure facilities will generally put an end to Ukraine’s earnings from electricity sales, which will deliver another powerful blow to the country’s economy.
Nikolay Ulyanov, Rubaltic.ru
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