You may have heard about blackouts in Ukraine. The threat of a winter energy collapse has been a recurring reality for Ukrainians for a while now. Russia began its systematic campaign against Ukraine’s energy system in the fall of 2022. At the time, large-scale missile and drone strikes caused power, heating, and communications outages lasting for hours across the country.
By the winter of 2023–2024, Ukraine had restored a significant part of the system, strengthened its protection, and expanded its ability to import electricity from the EU. In 2024, however, Russia changed its strategy. Instead of focusing mainly on the grid, its attacks increasingly targeted power generation itself. Between March and August 2024 alone, around 9 GW of generation capacity was destroyed — roughly half of what the country needs during winter. By June, 73% of thermal power units had been taken out of operation.
The winter of 2025–2026 marked the next, and considerably harsher, stage of this campaign. Russia attacked generation facilities, power grids, and district heating systems at the same time, often using hundreds of missiles and long-range drones in a single wave. According to the UN, between October 2025 and March 2026 alone, Russia carried out at least 423 attacks on electricity generation, transmission, and distribution facilities. This coincided with Ukraine’s coldest winter since 2010: temperatures in some areas fell below –20°C, hundreds of thousands of people were left without heating, and at certain points electricity was available for only a few hours a day.
This is why preparing for the upcoming winter has become one of Ukraine’s central national security issues. So important, in fact, that this year it became part of the political rationale for reshuffling the government itself.
The choice of the new Prime Minister only reinforced that emphasis. Sergii Koretskyi came directly from Naftogaz, Ukraine’s state-owned oil and gas company, which he had headed throughout the exceptionally difficult winter of 2025–2026. Zelenskyy specifically highlighted Koretskyi’s experience at Naftogaz and Ukrnafta and described getting through the coming winter as the new government’s main task.
Not only main, but also very urgent. Russian attacks during the winter of 2025–2026 damaged more than half of Ukraine’s electricity generation capacity. In Kyiv, power cuts sometimes lasted 14–16 hours, or even longer, while January strikes left thousands of apartment buildings without heating in temperatures well below freezing.
Add to this an even more worrying factor — the state of Ukraine’s air defence. Ukraine’s ability to intercept drones remains very high — above 90% in many attacks. Ballistic missiles, however, are a completely different problem. Defence against them depends almost entirely on scarce, high-end systems, above all the American Patriot. In July, Ukraine and several European partners even announced a separate initiative to develop a European anti-ballistic missile system, which in itself shows the scale of the problem.
The situation became even more worrying over the summer. On August 4, for example, Ukrainian air defence destroyed almost 90% of 115 Russian drones but failed to intercept any of the 24 ballistic missiles and four Zircon missiles launched in the same attack. Ukraine says that in 2026, deliveries of interceptor missiles from its partners have fallen to roughly one third of last year’s level.
In January 2026, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko publicly advised residents who had the option to temporarily leave the capital for places with alternative sources of electricity and heating. Now similar warnings are being voiced months before the next winter begins. Taras Chmut, director of Ukraine’s largest charitable foundation, Come Back Alive, and one of the country’s top military analysts, said in July that Ukrainians should already be thinking about where they will spend the winter. For some, he said, that could mean temporarily moving to a village, a smaller town, or even abroad.
We do have good reason to expect that this winter will be at least as difficult as that of 2025–2026. At the same time, over the past four years Ukraine has become better at adapting to such attacks. Electricity and heat generation are gradually becoming more decentralised, mobile generation is expanding, and there are more distributed energy sources. As a result, the destruction of one large facility no longer necessarily has the same consequences it would have had several years ago. Still, the damage from previous attacks is cumulative. The same is true of the shortage of anti-ballistic missile interceptors. Which of these factors will have the greater impact on the course of the winter is probably the main question heading into 2026–2027.
Ukraine cannot make its infrastructure impenetrable. As long as Russia is capable of launching hundreds of drones and missiles, some will still get through. The question now is whether additional interceptor missiles will be provided, how destructive the consequences of each successful strike will be, and whether individual attacks will once again be capable of paralysing entire cities. The only thing we do know is that another tough winter is coming.
Written by Nikita Khramov