Ukrainian engineers: struggling to keep the power on

Thursday 5 February 2026

Winter has always been an adversary in Ukraine. Long before Russia’s full-scale invasion, the country’s engineers planned for frost, snow load, ice accretion on power lines and the slow contraction of metal and concrete under sustained cold. What they did not plan for was a winter in which the weather itself would be weaponised: one in which sub-zero temperatures amplify the destructive effect of missiles, drones and artillery, and in which infrastructure repair must be conducted under the constant threat of renewed attack.

Ukrainian engineers now work at the intersection of physics, endurance and war. Power stations, substations, transmission lines, water pumping facilities and district heating networks have become deliberate targets, struck not for immediate military advantage but to erode civilian resilience. The logic is brutally simple. Cold multiplies harm. A severed power cable in summer is an inconvenience; in winter, it can become a matter of life and death.

The technical challenges begin with access. Russian strikes frequently crater roads, collapse bridges and scatter unexploded ordnance across repair zones. Engineers are often unable to reach damaged sites for hours or days, while sappers clear paths and air defence units attempt to suppress follow-on strikes. Even once access is gained, work rarely proceeds uninterrupted. Repair teams must assume that any critical node they approach remains a potential target. Mobile workshops, temporary shelters and rapid-assembly scaffolding are now standard tools, allowing teams to disperse at short notice when air raid sirens sound.

Cold itself imposes further constraints. Concrete cures poorly at low temperatures, requiring heated enclosures and additives that are difficult to source under wartime supply conditions. Steel becomes brittle, increasing the risk of structural failure during emergency repairs. Hydraulic systems thicken; lubricants lose viscosity; battery capacity drops sharply. Diesel generators, the backbone of emergency power provision, must be kept running continuously lest they fail to restart in extreme cold. Each of these factors slows work, increases error margins and raises the physical toll on those carrying it out.

Human fatigue is perhaps the least quantifiable but most decisive problem. Ukrainian engineers are working sustained shifts under conditions that would normally trigger shutdowns in peacetime systems. Many have been doing so for consecutive winters. They sleep in control rooms, in vehicles or in nearby basements, rising repeatedly through the night as new strikes knock out freshly restored systems. The line between engineer and emergency responder has blurred. These are highly trained specialists performing improvisational labour in freezing darkness, often while worrying about families sheltering at home without heat or power.

Supply chains compound the difficulty. Spare parts for Soviet-era infrastructure were already scarce before the invasion. Western-supplied equipment, while often more efficient, is not always easily integrated into legacy systems under emergency conditions. Engineers must therefore improvise hybrids, cannibalising damaged installations to keep others alive, or redesigning networks on the fly to bypass irreparable sections. This is engineering as triage: decisions are made not on the basis of optimal performance but of survivability over the next forty-eight hours.

The cumulative effect is a gradual reconfiguration of Ukraine’s infrastructure philosophy. Centralised systems, once favoured for efficiency, have proven vulnerable to precision strikes. Engineers increasingly prioritise decentralisation, redundancy and rapid isolation of damaged components. Temporary solutions, initially intended as stopgaps, become semi-permanent. This adaptability is a testament to Ukrainian technical competence, but it carries costs. Every improvised fix accrues future maintenance burdens, storing up structural fragility for the post-war period.

Yet there is also a moral dimension to this labour. Infrastructure repair in wartime Ukraine is not merely technical work; it is an act of civil resistance. Each restored substation, each reheated apartment block, is a rebuttal to the premise that civilians can be broken by cold and darkness. Engineers are acutely aware of this symbolism. Many speak of their work not in terms of professional duty but of responsibility: to neighbours, to hospitals, to children attempting to attend school online from unheated flats.

Russia’s strategy of winter attacks assumes that exhaustion will eventually outpace ingenuity. Thus far, Ukrainian engineers have disproved that assumption, but at immense personal cost. As another winter deepens, the question is no longer whether they can keep the systems running indefinitely. It is how much strain a society can absorb when the maintenance of everyday life becomes a nightly battle against ice, steel and fire from the sky.

In Ukraine, winter has ceased to be a season. She has become a front line, and engineers stand among her quietest defenders.