The German government is keen to learn from Ukraine’s experience defending its electricity grid against attacks, after experiencing recent blackouts caused by sabotaged power lines in its capital.
For more than four years, Russia has battered Ukraine’s energy infrastructure with missiles and drones – at times, much of the country, including its capital Kyiv, was subject to hours of blackout.
Yet, somehow, Berlin found itself in the same boat in January when left-wing extremists with a single firebomb caused the city’s worst multi-day power cut since the Second World War.
Neither emergency services nor politicians were prepared for the disruption that triggered a massive manhunt.
“Energy is no longer a separate sector, it is the operational foundation of the state,” Ukraine’s Energy Minister Denys Shmyhal said on Tuesday at the opening of an energy security conference in Berlin.
Without the “system of systems”, the state is nothing, Shmyhal added.
Kyiv has, by and large, managed to keep going for more than four years, a feat that draws considerable admiration from abroad.
“Resilience is not limited to the institutional level,” said German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul, speaking alongside the Ukrainian minister. “In Ukraine, ordinary citizens also help to foster it.”
To learn from Ukraine is to learn to win, Wadephul suggested, saying we should “listen very carefully.”
The Ukrainian way
Kyiv’s recipe is simple: expand the European Union’s trifecta of functioning markets, efficiency, and integration.
“Resilience must become an engineering category,” Shmyhal said. In his besieged country, protecting the grid meant “special protective structures around key energy facilities” and air defence.
“Our second lesson is distributed resilience,” the energy minister explained. Moving away from big, centralised power plants to honeycomb-like decentralised structures “where each element is able to operate with a degree of autonomy”.
Susanne Nies, a think tank expert at the Berlin-based Helmholtz Zentrum, said Germany needed to learn from Ukraine how to operate an electricity network under attack, repair equipment quickly, and create “triple redundancy” strategic reserves of grid equipment.
Berlin must also develop security protocols to be followed before and after attacks, and look at how to diversify and decentralise energy production, she said.
“Time is of the essence; Ukraine acts with courage and quickly, learning through trial and error, something that, unfortunately, is not as widespread in Germany,” Nies told Euractiv.
Olena Pavlenko, who heads the Kyiv-based think tank Dixi Group, said knowledge exchange between Ukraine and Germany is already taking place at multiple levels,” from high-level political exchanges to grid operator talks and municipal-level exchanges.
Germany was focused on shielding vulnerable spots in the grid and building up strategic reserves at the European level, she noted. “Ukraine’s hands-on experience is increasingly shaping European thinking on energy security, transforming the country from a recipient of support into a provider of practical solutions,” Pavlenko told Euractiv.
For Georg Zachmann, an energy specialist at the Brussels-based think tank Bruegel, Ukraine needs to go further. Kyiv should “finally take stronger steps towards building a defensible energy system alongside the constant patch jobs,” he said.
This would mean getting the most out of “small, system-friendly facilities”, with better planning support from its allies. “Partners should not hesitate to demand reforms from Ukraine that enable such investments,” he added.
Best not to mention it
Conspicuously absent at the Berlin conference: talk of the issue that saw Shmyhal shoehorned into his role in January. His predecessor, German Galushchenko, is currently being investigated for alleged corruption.
Learning from one another is a “feel-good topic where nobody gets hurt”, as one member of the audience put it.
With the US having cut most of its support for Ukraine after US President Donald Trump returned to the White House last year, and Europe stepping in to fill that gap, Germany has become Ukraine’s largest donor. Berlin has contributed some €1.3 billion just through its energy emergency support fund since the onset of the war in 2022.
Officials have long held concerns, usually voiced in private, that some of the money is being skimmed off in the chaos of war.
In late 2024, Berlin effectively got a seat on the board of Ukraine’s high-voltage grid operator Ukrenergo, in the person of former State Secretary Patrick Graichen, who did not attend the event hosted by the foreign ministry.
“The German government has an interest in a supervisory board for the Ukrainian grid operator Ukrenergo, formed in accordance with OECD standards and comprising several independent, international experts/members,” it said in early 2025.
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UPDATE: This article was updated on 19 May 15:34 to include additional commentary.
