Ukraine fights to survive as its allies hesitate: Marc Champion

Key topics:Ukraine faces its harshest winter amid worsening energy attacks.Western allies risk faltering, leaving Kyiv short on funds and aid.Renewable energy projects boost resilience against Russian strikes..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Marc Champion.Ukraine is about to suffer its most brutal winter since Russia invaded in 2022. That isn’t a risk but a certainty as both sides sense they’re blocked on the ground and focus on the long-range air war. Russia has a plan for victory and the Ukrainians have one for survival. The question is whether Kyiv’s allies have a plan at all. The short answer is no, or at least not yet.President Donald Trump’s decision to sanction Russia’s two largest oil producers, Rosneft JSC and Lukoil PJSC, has offered a ray of hope — but that’s all. It’s unclear whether Trump is willing to endure the costs involved in enforcing those sanctions hard or long enough to change Vladimir Putin’s calculations. Worse, US-Ukraine policy remains self-contradictory, because the Trump administration has at the same time pushed the entire financial burden for arming and aiding Ukraine onto a cash-strapped Europe. .Read more:.Trump’s “shouting match” peacemaking is as lethal for Ukraine as ever: Marc Champion.Europe knows the only feasible way to fill the hole left by US financial withdrawal is to tap €140 billion euros ($163 billion) of frozen Russian central bank assets. But Belgium – where most of the money is held – just blew up a deal for fear of having to shoulder the cost of legal retaliation; at best this will now happen in December. Ukraine, meanwhile, looks set to run out of cash by the end of the first quarter of 2026.This faltering political will in Washington and Europe has turned Kyiv’s allies into the war’s soft underbelly. It’s what they do next, or rather don’t do, that will likely decide how it ends, because Ukraine’s plan for survival depends on staying in the fight long enough for the rising costs of Putin’s invasion to persuade him he can’t afford to continue.I visited Ukraine a few weeks ago to examine what the government’s “defend, restore, develop” mantra for making it through winter consists of. The “defend” element is covered by new developments in counter-drone technologies, fortifying major electrical substations and the pursuit of more munitions from the US and Europe, which I’ve written about here and here..Suffice to say that it isn’t enough to neuter the impact of Russia’s dramatic increase in drone and missile production, which enables it routinely to fire volleys up to 10 times larger than in previous winters. This onslaught has already destroyed about 60% of Ukraine’s natural gas production capacity, adding more than $2 billion to import bills this winter. That’s more money Kyiv doesn’t have. One executive at a mid-size private energy company told me the same facility they’d repaired last year after it was hit by two drones was struck by 17 at once this summer, causing far more damage. So “restore” will also take more time and funding than it used to. But it’s the “develop” part of the formula that’s most intriguing. Oleksandr Selyshchev, chief executive officer for renewables at DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy investor, showed me 70 2.5-meter (8.2-feet) tall battery storage cubes his company had just installed near Kyiv. It was one of six such facilities around the country that had come online just days before, with a total capacity of 200 megawatts, or about half the output of a typical nuclear reactor. When Russia destroys part of the power network, the batteries from Fluence Energy Inc. of the US should kick in within milliseconds to prevent the sudden imbalances in the grid that force blackouts. .I also visited a DTEK windfarm project about a two-hour drive from Odesa, in Southern Ukraine. The company decided to restart construction of a 500MW site in mid-2022, as soon as it became clear Russia was attacking energy infrastructure. That may seem an odd choice, given that the €450 million investment would immediately become a target, but it turns out green energy is better suited to war; turbines spread over dozens of square kilometers are much harder to destroy than a single coal- or gas-fired power plant.I watched as one turbine, struck during a Russian attack earlier this year, was dismantled. A damaged 79-meter hollow blade, thick enough to stand in, lay next to an access track. The 61-ton blade hub had been lifted down that morning, but the whole repair takes only about a week and strikes are rare. “By nature, wind power is more resilient,” Selyshchev told me. “Of course you can destroy anything, but wind is more decentralized and so easier to secure.” With 19 turbines installed, up from four at the start of the war, the Tyligulska Wind Power Plant now produces 114 MW. The remaining 64 turbines from Vestas Wind Systems A/S should be up and running by the end of 2026, by which time DTEK also hopes to have begun work on a further 650MW wind farm. That would account for about half the government’s plan to add 2GW of wind power to the grid..This is power Ukraine needs. The country had a total generating capacity of 25 gigawatts in 2021, reduced by occupation and destruction to 17GW today, infrastructure minister Oleksiy Kuleba told me in an interview at his Kyiv office. The country needs 15 to 17GW to keep the heat on, which leaves very little buffer. But Kuleba says the experience of previous winter assaults has also built resilience. About 1GW of Ukraine’s remaining output capacity has been decentralized to smaller, harder-to-destroy units, while many shops, offices and schools across the country have acquired backup generators. When heat is lost over the coming months, some 10,000 of these become “heat centers” to which people scan go to stay warm.Will that be enough to stop millions more Ukrainians fleeing West? Perhaps. But the mere potential for a new, politically destabilizing wave of refugees forms part of Putin’s campaign to strike at that soft, allied underbelly with the threat of a much wider war. That’s why he appeared on TV in military uniform for just the third time since the start of the war on Oct. 26, listening to Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov report on Russia’s allegedly inexorable battlefield victories and boasting of a newly tested nuclear-powered, nuclear-capable cruise missile that has unlimited range and can’t be stopped..Read more:.Max Hastings: Trump’s Ukraine peace push signals weakness to Putin.It’s hard to know if Putin’s latest wonder-weapon is in fact unstoppable, just as it’s dubious he’d risk nuclear war. Equally, as tough as the situation certainly is for Ukrainian troops, Russia has taken less than 1% of Ukraine’s territory at enormous cost since stopping Kyiv’s last successful counteroffensive in November 2022. And, as the former Russian central banker Alexandra Prokopenko has pointed out, Putin faces his own emerging strains at home. Still, Gerasimov’s propagandistic claims of encirclements and the imminent collapse of Ukrainian forces along the front may prove to be self-fulfilling prophesies, should allies fail to provide their share of the means to fight this winter. Putin’s message to the West is clear: Ukraine will lose anyhow and we’re ready for the ultimate war if anyone gets in our way; are you? The conclusion for leaders in the US and Europe to draw should be as clear: Whatever they’re going to do, they need to do it decisively and now..© 2025 Bloomberg L.P.

Ukraine fights to survive as its allies hesitate: Marc Champion

Key topics:

Related Stories