EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Since February 2022, Ukraine’s energy sector has operated under sustained missile and UAV strikes that evolved from early attacks on fuel logistics and large generation assets to repeated, combined campaigns against generation, transmission corridors, distributionnetworks, and — from 2025 onwards — gas infrastructure and district heating systems. Over time, the threat intensified not only in scale but in frequency, targeting logic, and complexity: attack campaigns increasingly combined different weapon types, repeated strikes on previously damaged facilities, and deliberately targeted both generation capacity and network bottlenecks. This reduced recovery windows, increased operational uncertainty, and shifted the challenge from managing isolated incidents to absorbing and recovering from cumulative damage.
Under these conditions, the concept of energy security has shifted from a narrow capacity- demand question to a broader set of operational capabilities: keeping critical services running under attack, preserving system controllability, and restoring supply rapidly under conditions of repeated damage and equipment scarcity.
Ukraine’s pre-war infrastructure legacy was the critical structural constraint throughout. A significant share of key equipment in generation and transmission was designed and operated since Soviet times — with limited replacement options, long manufacturing lead times for compatible hardware, and complex international sourcing requirements. These constraints were compounded by wartime operating conditions: risks to repair crews, restricted site access, repeated air alerts, and the need to prioritise limited materials and technical teams across multiple regions simultaneously.
This paper draws on Ukraine’s wartime energy operations from 2022 to early 2026 to identify ten operational lessons and their practical implications for resilience-by-design in infrastructure planning, investment, operations, and governance.
Centralised generation concentrates systemic risk. Systems built around large plants and long transmission corridors create a small number of high-impact nodes. Striking those nodes produces disproportionate disruption and regional supply asymmetry — even when generation capacity remains available elsewhere in the system. The practical implication is not to abandon large-scale generation, but to complement it with distributed capacity for critical loads, modular deployable solutions, and a planning metric of regional adequacy that explicitly accounts for transmission constraints.
Flexible generation is both the backbone of system balancing and the highest-value target. Real-time system stability depends less on total installed capacity than on fast-responding resources that cover peaks, provide reserves, and maintain frequency and voltage under stressed conditions. Because flexible capacity is scarcer and harder to restore, its loss produces a disproportionately large systemic effect — and where flexibility is tied to cogeneration plants, strikes simultaneously undermine electrical manoeuvring capacity and urban heat supply.
Grid resilience determines whether generation capacity can be used. In multiple attack episodes, it was grid assets — substations, transmission lines, distribution nodes — rather than generation that became the binding constraint on supply. High installed capacity provides no resilience benefit if the grid cannot deliver power, re-route flows around damaged sections, or operate in emergency configurations. Redundancy, sectionalization, and standardised fast-deployable restoration solutions are the operational foundation of grid resilience.
Under sustained attack, urban energy systems shift from reliability optimization to controlled systemic degradation. This is a qualitatively distinct risk type that sector-by- sector resilience frameworks do not capture. Electricity supply disruption functions as atrigger for cascading failures across heating, water, transport, and essential services — and seasonal stress compresses the time window between a manageable deficit and irreversible physical damage. Kyiv’s winter of 2025–2026 demonstrated that below a certain threshold, restoring power restores services; above it, damage to pipes, generators, and aging infrastructure accumulates faster than it can be repaired. Planning frameworks must map cross-sector dependency chains, define thresholds of irreversibility for eachdependent system, and treat centralised urban heat sources as dual-priority assets.
ENTSO-E synchronisation is a strategic resilience asset, but its value depends on constraints that must be explicitly managed. Cross-border transfer capacity limits, the number and availability of import entry points, internal west-to-east transmission corridors, and system controllability under stressed conditions all determine how much external support can be converted into effective supply where shortages are greatest. Integration should be treated not as an unlimited substitute for domestic resilience, but as a critical asset whose value depends on the condition of the system receiving the support.
Restoration speed depends on standardisation more than on funding. The availability of standardised repair packages, interoperable specifications, mobile substations, and plug- and-play solutions consistently proved more decisive for recovery timelines than the volume of financial assistance alone. A unified nomenclature of critical spare parts, pre-positioned warehouse hubs, and standardised temporary supply configurations reduce restoration time from weeks to days and make international assistance deployable at scale.
Energy security under sustained attack requires layered physical, air defence, and cyber protection — embedded by design, not added after the fact. Air defence reduces the probability and scale of damage; passive engineering protection reduces consequences when strikes penetrate; and cyber protection preserves operational control of assets. Protection must be integrated into modernisation and repair programmes from the outset — as a standard cost of investment, not an optional supplement. Wartime experience shows that facilities degrade faster than they can be restored when protection is absent; the «protection-by-design» principle directly addresses this dynamic.
Oil and gas supply resilience requires distributed storage, clear prioritisation rules, and maintained import capacity. Early attacks on refineries and logistics nodes demonstrated the fragility of supply chains built around centralised storage. The government’s rapid pivot to import-based supply — supported by fiscal adjustments, price deregulation, and simplified import procedures — stabilised markets, but also exposed the absence of minimum stock frameworks that would have provided an earlier buffer. For gas, formalised prioritisation through PSO regimes and protected consumer categories provided a more structured response, and this model warrants systematic application to oil products as well.
Crisis communication is an operational function of the energy system, not only a public information task. Effective communication shapes demand behaviour, reduces peak loads, and directly affects system balance during shortage periods. The critical lesson is the systematic differentiation between scheduled outages and emergency restrictions — and the clear, multi-level messaging architecture that makes this distinction actionable for consumers. Equally important is the resilience of communication against deliberate disinformation: in Ukraine’s experience, Russian information actors exploited outages to spread panic, trigger destabilising consumer behaviour, and erode trust in operators. This makes message synchronisation across institutions and proactive counter-narrativeguidance a structural requirement of crisis communication systems.
Industrial demand response is an underutilised resilience resource. Energy-intensive industries that shifted from compensating outages to actively managing their internal consumption regime — rescheduling loads, deploying short-horizon buffers, improvingpower quality, and adopting microgrid logic — reduced both their own operational losses and the depth of system-wide restrictions. This transformation converts industry from a passive victim of outages into an active participant in system balancing, and warrantsexplicit recognition and support in regulatory frameworks.
Regulatory policy is a resilience instrument that operates on two parallel tracks. Wartime fast-track mechanisms — declarative permitting, simplified procurement, emergency contracting — reduce the procedural friction that slows recovery under time pressure.Simultaneously, market stabilisation measures — price caps, liquidity support, non-market procurement for scarce equipment — preserve the financial viability of the actors on whom recovery depends. Neither track is sufficient without the other: procedural speed without financial stability does not produce reliable supply, and financial stability without procedural flexibility does not produce timely restoration.
Ukraine’s experience demonstrates that energy resilience is not a property of any single asset or system — it is produced by a portfolio of capabilities that must function simultaneously and reinforce each other: distributed and flexible generation, robust and repairable grids, standardised recovery logistics, layered protection, cross-sector urban planning, disciplined communication, demand-side adaptability, and regulation that removes friction without removing accountability. Institutionalising these capabilities means shifting from ad-hoc emergency response to a durable resilience-by-design model embedded in infrastructure planning, investment decisions, and governance frameworks.
This material was prepared by DIXI GROUP NGO with support of the International Renaissance Foundation within the framework of the project “Strengthening Ukraine’s Resilience in Energy”. The material reflects the views of the authors and does not necessarily represent the position of the International Renaissance Foundation.