By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

How The US Can Help Ukraine

Since beginning his war in February, Putin has repeatedly told Europe that it would “freeze” without Russian gas, an attempt to divide the EU and turn public opinion against support for Ukraine’s struggle. He failed.  

He now appears to be attempting to do the same with Ukraine, where he repeatedly targeted civilian air and missile strikes against civilian targets. 

Kyiv hasn’t been its usual self for weeks. For half the day, the Ukrainian capital, known for its cafes, bustling nightlife, and crowded cocktail dens even through a pandemic and more than eight months of a full-scale Russian invasion, is plunged into darkness, mostly disappearing from view except for millions of little flickers of candlelight.  

Russia, repeatedly beaten on the battlefield, has resorted to knocking out Ukrainian power and heat ahead of the winter. Russian missile strikes and drone attacks have shuttered close to 40 percent of the country’s power plants. 

The first shock has been economic. Ukraine’s government fears the economy could shrink by one-third. Some businesses in Kyiv are panicking. People who have been in Kyiv, who have stayed in Kyiv, and who have thousands of employees are worried that one more attack will be a week without electricity.

A former Ukrainian economy minister Tymofiy Mylovanov has set up makeshift shelters that officials call “warming centers,” small rooms outfitted for emergency heating. But the makeshift effort isn’t enough to get the city of 3 million people through the winter. “We’re talking about, you know, 20 people, 50 people, a hundred people,” Mylovanov said. “We’re not talking about thousands of people.” And the blackouts don’t just mean Ukrainians are reading by candlelight. They have left millions without water, sewage, and hot food, including children and the elderly. 

Temperatures are already hovering at or below freezing during Kyiv nights in November. Russia’s missile strikes against the Ukrainian power grid have knocked out power to major cities—not including the massive Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant that has been offline for months. The increasingly dire situation has set off a mad dash in Western capitals to prevent a further humanitarian crisis in the cold. 

Ukraine still can generate enough electricity to meet people’s needs because demand has dropped dramatically since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February. But Russia’s campaign of strikes has decimated Ukraine’s ability to transfer high-voltage power that runs through power lines to lower voltages that consumers can use. That has also limited the ability to import energy from other regions to deal with the problem. 

On Capitol Hill, current and former Ukrainian officials are telling anyone who will listen that they desperately need transformers. These massive electromagnetic devices transfer power between circuits in power stations and on railways. It’s high-voltage transformers that are most needed. And in Ukraine, unfortunately, we only have one manufacturer capable of producing a maximum of three transformers every six months. After two waves of major attacks on our critical infrastructure, we need tons of them.

But there’s no quick fix for the transformers, leaving U.S. and Ukrainian officials to work overtime to stave off a mass exodus, like the lines of cars out of Kyiv that preceded Russia’s full-scale invasion. “The blackouts will be there for quite a long time until we have new transformers,” Voytsitska added. On the request list are mobile and secondary substations and power switches.  

Ukraine is also in need of spare parts, boilers, and stoves, and Ukrainian officials are trying to find space heaters that can heat destroyed rooms, homes, and school gymnasiums, where internally displaced people have been forced to hide from Russian bombings, to set up more makeshift warming centers. The effort extends to major Ukrainian cities, including Kyiv, Kharkiv, Dnipro, and Zhytomyr. In Washington, Ukrainian allies are also trying to push the message to the Swiss and British governments. 

It’s unclear how far the requests have gone to the State Department, and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) have proceeded. Pentagon spokesman Brig. On Tuesday, Gen. Patrick Ryder told reporters that the Biden administration discussed providing generators, water purification systems, heaters, and other winterization aid. USAID has pushed through about $271 million in winterization aid to Ukraine, about a fifth of which is earmarked explicitly for Kyiv. 

When Russia began its invasion of Ukraine on 24 Feb, the 47 underground stations of Kyiv’s metro system together sheltered around 40,000 people. Eight months later, when Russia kicked off a new bombing campaign that is still ongoing, using cruise missiles and Iranian exploding drones to target the Ukrainian capital and critical infrastructure throughout the country, the stations—some located nearly 100 meters underground—once again became a place of refuge for thousands of Kyiv residents and their pets. But while in February, city authorities halted rail service for nearly two months to accommodate civilians seeking shelter, the boxy blue and yellow cars of the Kyiv Metro have continued working throughout the near-daily air raid alerts that have resonated in the city since 10 Oct.

The Kyiv Metro has always had two functions: first, as a transport infrastructure and second, as a civil defense infrastructure. The rail network was built during the Soviet era, and its stations were designed to double as bomb shelters—during a potential NATO attack. Residents find it surreal that those same stations shield civilians from Russian missiles.

 

 

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