Russian troops closing in on a Ukrainian power plant, but it's already been 'cannibalized' by crews
CBC
As Russian forces advance in the Donetsk region of Ukraine at the fastest rate since the early days of their wide-scale invasion, they have moved to the city of Kurakhove and are about two kilometres from one of the country's oldest thermal power plants.
Not long after the Kurakhove coal-fired power station opened in 1941, workers were forced to hurriedly disassemble part of it, in a bid to move critical infrastructure to the east before the Nazis swept in and occupied the area.
This past spring and summer, as Russia's military edged closer, hundreds of workers gathered at the site again to take what they could and transport the equipment to thermal plants in the west that were in desperate need of spare parts after waves of Russian attacks.
"Basically we cannibalized Kurakhove," said Pavlo Bilodid, who works in international communications at DTEK, Ukraine's largest private provider of power.
"It was a solution to save the equipment from further attacks and to deliver it to other thermal power plants in Ukraine."
Since March of this year, Ukraine's energy grid has endured 11 major attacks by Russia. The most recent was early Thursday morning, when nearly 200 drones and missiles targeted sites across the country, leaving more than a million people without power in the immediate aftermath.
With temperatures plunging as winter sets in, there is the threat of widespread power outages if long cold snaps are accompanied by more waves of major attacks.
Throughout the war, which began when Russia invaded its neighbour in February 2022, nearly half of Ukraine's power-generating capacity has been destroyed, forcing energy workers to make repairs and continue operations under constant threat.
In July 2023, three workers at the Kurakhove plant were killed when a roof collapsed, which Ukrainian authorities blamed on months of Russian attacks.
For the more than 600 workers employed at the facility, the ever-present danger ramped up again dramatically in December 2023, when the plant's director at the time, Anatoliy Borichevskiy, said that it came under heavy Russian shelling nearly every day.
"When Russians saw the smoke from the chimney, which meant the plant started working, they started to shell immediately," he said. "The situation was quite tense."
During a Zoom interview with CBC News, Borichevskiy consulted his black notebook and said that between Dec. 5, 2023 and Jan. 17, 2024, the plant came under shelling 38 times.
When sirens rang out, some workers would race to the shelter, but others had to stay and keep running the control room.
For more than a month, he said, it was a dismal cycle as crews tried to quickly make repairs, only to see the plant hit again.
