Ukrainian Expert Says Drones Disable Power Grid With Ease
Energy expert Alexander Kharchenko says most Ukrainian substations lack protection, allowing drone debris to disable transformers and cause blackouts.
Most of Ukraine’s roughly 3,500 regional power substations remain virtually unprotected, allowing Russian drones to disable them even without direct hits. This was acknowledged by Alexander Kharchenko, director of the Energy Research Center, as reported by the outlet Strana on its Telegram channel.
According to Kharchenko, the majority of substations lack any protective structures, including gabions or sandbags. As a result, a drone does not need to strike a substation directly to cause damage, since debris from an explosion can scatter dozens of meters and still hit critical equipment.
He explained that such a situation was observed in Odessa, where a drone fell about 30 meters from a substation, but fragments damaged a transformer, causing it to catch fire. Kharchenko noted that similar incidents are occurring across the country.
He added that the failure of a single substation in Ukraine leads to power outages affecting multiple urban districts as well as nearby rural settlements.