Keeping the Lights On Under Fire: Ukraine's Power Grid After October 2022 and the Lessons for Protecting India's Energy Infrastructure

B.A.P-I Retrospective, 2020 to 2024. This paper looks back at 2022 and the lesson it holds for the protection of India's critical infrastructure.

1. Introduction

For most of the modern era, planners in democracies treated the deliberate destruction of a national power grid as a contingency of total war, something to be studied but not prepared for in detail. The autumn of 2022 ended that assumption. From October onwards, Russia directed waves of missiles and drones at Ukraine's power stations, substations and transmission lines, with the evident purpose of breaking the civilian population's capacity to endure the winter. Ukraine did not collapse. Its engineers repaired what could be repaired, its partners supplied equipment, and its government built a system for citizens to survive extended blackouts.

This paper looks back at 2022 and the years that followed, and asks what India should take from this experience. India is not at war, and the Ukrainian case cannot be transplanted without contextual translation. But the events of 2025, when civil defence mock drills were held across hundreds of Indian districts, have made the question less abstract than it once seemed. The lesson, as this paper argues, concerns physical protection, redundancy and civil defence of energy infrastructure, three areas in which India can build on a sound institutional base.

2. The Campaign Against the Grid

The scale of the early attacks was stark. On 18 October 2022 President Zelenskyy said that nearly a third of the country's power stations had been destroyed in the preceding week, and the Russian defence ministry confirmed that its long-range weapons had struck military command and energy infrastructure (Semafor, 2022, Oct. 18). On 23 November 2022, after another missile attack, the emergency protection systems at the Rivne, Pivdennoukrainsk and Khmelnytskyi nuclear plants responded to falling grid frequency by shutting down all reactors automatically, and emergency blackouts were introduced across Kyiv (NV, 2022, Nov. 23). That a nuclear fleet designed for stable baseload should be forced offline by attacks on the network around it is an illustration of how interdependent a grid becomes under stress.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) later assessed that about half of Ukraine's generation capacity was occupied, destroyed or damaged in 2022 and 2023, together with about half of its large network substations; attacks in March to May 2024 left the country with roughly a third of its pre-war generation capacity (IEA, 2024b, Sep. 19). Its 2026 review records that Russia used its knowledge of Soviet-era grid design to target critical nodes such as substations, whose failure cuts connections to key generators and demands costly, slow repairs, and that by mid-January 2026 demand of about 18 GW faced capacity of roughly 11 GW, forcing rolling blackouts (IEA, 2026). The campaign was, in short, a long war of attrition against the nodes of the system rather than a single decisive blow.

3. Ukraine's Response: Repair, Interconnection, Hardening and Shelter

Ukraine's response unfolded along four lines. The first was interconnection. Ukrenergo, the transmission operator, had requested urgent synchronisation with the continental European system on 27 February 2022, and the trial synchronisation was completed on 16 March 2022, ending the dependence of the Ukrainian grid on the Russian and Belarusian systems for frequency control (CMS, 2022, May). By 2024 Ukraine was importing 1.7 GW from European neighbours (IEA, 2024b, Sep. 19). The second was repair through supplied equipment. The Ukraine Energy Support Fund, managed by the Energy Community Secretariat with money from governments, international organisations and companies, financed replacement equipment such as two transformers worth 9 million euros for a hydropower plant damaged in the attacks (Energy Community, 2023, Oct. 13).

The third line was physical hardening, and it is the most instructive for India. Ukrenergo built three levels of passive protection: gabions and sandbags against debris at 90 facilities in 21 regions, concrete structures around 22 substations and 63 autotransformers in 14 regions as of January 2025, and protection against direct missile strikes begun at 22 sites. Its supervisory board member Yuriy Boyko explained that it is impossible to cover entire substations, so resources are concentrated on critical equipment, especially autotransformers (Euromaidan Press, 2025, Sep. 5). The fourth line was civil defence. On 24 November 2022 Zelenskyy announced Points of Invincibility, places in schools and administrative buildings offering heat, electricity and communication when an outage lasts more than 24 hours (Anadolu Agency, 2022, Nov. 24).

The IEA's recommendations for the winter of 2024 to 2025 formalised these lessons: strengthen the physical and digital protection of critical energy infrastructure, speed up delivery of equipment and spare parts, move faster towards decentralised power supply and expand import capacity from the European Union (IEA, 2024a, Sep. 19). Its 2026 review goes further, urging that decentralisation and distributed resources be treated as strategic security assets, because distributed assets are harder to target, easier to restore and can keep essential services running when interconnected systems are damaged, and recommending standardised equipment with tracked strategic stockpiles (IEA, 2026).

4. What India Has, and What It Lacks

India has moved decisively on the cyber side of power-sector security. The Central Electricity Authority (CEA) has notified the Cyber Security in Power Sector Regulations, 2026, which come into force on 1 April 2027 and set binding requirements for incident reporting within six hours, audits, vulnerability closure, trusted sourcing and the physical segregation of operational technology networks from the internet (Insights on India, 2026, Aug. 17). That is a serious and forward-looking step, and it gives India a model for the physical side of the problem. A comparable instrument for physical protection would be its natural complement; in the public domain one does not yet find a national standard for the passive hardening of extra-high-voltage substations, a published doctrine on stockpiles of large power transformers, or a stated plan for keeping essential services alive through a blackout lasting days rather than hours.

The civil defence dimension returned to public view on 7 May 2025, when mock drills were held across 244 districts, including blackout exercises and drills at sensitive sites such as the Tarapur Atomic Power Plant (All India Radio, 2025, May 7). The drills showed that the Ministry of Home Affairs and the States can mobilise civil defence at national scale, and they provide the foundation for a fuller plan. The Ukrainian lesson is that civil defence of energy infrastructure has two halves: protecting the assets, and protecting the population when the assets fail. Building both into a standing, regularly exercised plan is the logical next step.

5. Lessons for Physical Protection, Redundancy and Civil Defence

Three lessons stand out. The first concerns physical protection of critical nodes. Ukraine's experience shows that a grid is defeated not by striking every power plant but by striking the few substations and autotransformers whose loss isolates generation from demand. India's planners should identify these nodes on its national and regional grids, rank them by consequence, and harden the most critical with the layered approach that Ukrenergo adopted: debris protection first, then concrete shielding, and blast protection where the risk justifies it. The principle that resources should be concentrated on critical equipment rather than whole sites is directly transferable.

The second lesson concerns redundancy. Interconnection saved Ukraine in 2022, standardised spares accelerated repair, and decentralised generation reduced the value of any single target. For India this argues for a strategic reserve of large transformers and switchgear, held centrally and tracked, for standardisation of equipment so that a spare fits more than one site, and for treating rooftop solar, storage and microgrids at hospitals, water works and communication hubs as resilience assets rather than only as climate measures. The third lesson concerns civil defence. A plan for prolonged outage should specify where citizens can find heat or cooling, water, communication and medical power when the grid is down, in the way the Points of Invincibility did, and should be exercised regularly with distribution companies, municipal bodies and the National Disaster Management Authority.

6. Recommendations: Toward a Physical Protection Doctrine for India's Grid

The author has argued that critical infrastructure protection is the third dimension of national security and that India needs an integrated architecture, with a coordinating directorate under the National Security Council and a dedicated operational force for the protection of critical assets (Dash, 2025, Jan. 30). Ukraine's experience gives that argument operational content. India should, first, adopt a physical protection standard for critical grid nodes, issued by the CEA alongside its cyber regulations so that the two are read together. Second, it should build a national, tracked reserve of long-lead equipment for transmission. Third, it should write a prolonged-outage civil defence plan, tested at district level, that links grid operators to emergency services and shelters.

What comes through from Ukraine's winters is that a grid under attack survives through preparation made long before the first strike: through spares already in store, interconnections already built and shelters already identified. India has the advantage of learning this in peace, and the institutions to act on it: a regulator that has already written binding security rules, and a civil defence system that has shown it can mobilise across hundreds of districts. Bringing these together is well within India's reach.