Ukraine’s leading energy executive has warned that Russian attacks on the country’s power grid will persist unless President Trump intervenes, with millions facing the threat of a winter without heat or electricity.
DTEK’s Maxim Timchenko made his remarks as Ukraine prepared for additional on energy infrastructure, one day after Trump met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for the third time in an effort to end the nearly four-year war.
“Yesterday’s meeting gave us fresh hope. But our job isn’t to rely on hope alone — it’s to keep doing what we’ve done for four years: addressing urgent challenges and fighting every day,” Timchenko told Digital.
“We are extremely thankful to President Trump for his leadership. We believe he and his team are the only ones capable of pressuring Russia to negotiate and end the war, alongside the support of our European Union partners and other nations,” the DTEK chief executive stated.
Founded by Ukrainian entrepreneur Rinat Akhmetov, DTEK is and a cornerstone of the country’s power grid.
Prior to Russia’s full-scale 2022 invasion, the company ran eight thermal power plants. Three were subsequently seized by Russian troops.
“Today, we operate , and every one of them has been targeted at least five times since the full-scale invasion began,” Timchenko confirmed.
He characterized the damage as unprecedented. “The scale of destruction is unlike any energy system globally. Nothing like this has occurred in modern times,” he noted.
At one stage, he said, almost all of DTEK’s power generation capacity was damaged or destroyed, resulting in losses amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars.
“And I can state that at one point, 90% of our generation capacity was either damaged or destroyed,” he elaborated.
“Because of this destruction, we’ve incurred hundreds of millions in direct damages — and that’s not even accounting for lost revenue. For 2025 alone, our recovery budget was approximately $220 million, but since the start of the full-scale invasion, it’s been hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars,” Timchenko said.
Despite the destruction and losses endured, his company has repeatedly reconnected power to .
“Since 2022, we’ve succeeded in reconnecting over 30 million households and customers,” Timchenko said. “We’re fighting, and we’re quick.”
“The past two years have been extraordinarily tough. Attacks have grown so frequent that we operate in crisis mode every day — our equipment is destroyed, power plants are damaged, and our only focus is restoring power as quickly as possible,” Timchenko said.
He also noted that recovery efforts involve restarting gas drilling, proceeding with construction of Eastern Europe’s largest wind farm, and partnering with U.S. firm Fluence to build a major battery storage system.
In Odesa, for instance, roughly 600,000 people have been impacted by outages, with some neighborhoods going without power for multiple days.
But arrived on Dec. 26, when and surrounding areas, leaving over 1 million people without electricity amid freezing temperatures.
“People have adapted to living without essentials like electricity,” Timchenko said.
“In Kyiv, temperatures were minus 10 degrees Celsius, and because of this attack, we had no water, no heat — and obviously, no electricity,” he said.
“They hit us with ballistic missiles, Kalibr cruise missiles, and other munitions, followed by 500 drones and additional missile types,” he added.
Looking to the future, Timchenko emphasized Ukraine’s need for ongoing support.
“The energy system is the heart of this struggle. Modern life is impossible without electricity. We require sustained global support,” he concluded.