As freezing winter blackouts loom, Zelenskyy faces criticism over energy supply

Volodymyr Zelenskyy is under mounting pressure from critics to keep the lights and heating on while Vladimir Putin ramps up his military assault on Ukraine’s energy supply.

The Ukrainian president is fearful of a public backlash over likely prolonged blackouts this winter and is trying to shift the blame, said the former head of Ukraine’s state-owned national power company.

Thirty-nine-year-old Volodymyr Kudrytskyi, who led Ukrenergo until he was forced to resign last year amid infighting over political control of the energy sector, said he’s one of those whom the President’s Office is looking to scapegoat.

During an exclusive interview with POLITICO, he predicted Ukraine will face a “very difficult winter” under relentless Russian bombardment — and argued Kyiv’s government has made that worse through a series of missteps.

Adding fuel to his clash with Zelenskyy’s team, Kudrytskyi was charged last week with embezzlement, prompting an outcry from Ukraine’s civil society and opposition lawmakers. 

They say Kudrytskyi’s arraignment involving a contract — one of hundreds — he authorized seven years ago, when he was a deputy director at Ukrenergo, is a glaring example of the aggressive use of lawfare by the Ukrainian leadership to intimidate opponents, silence critics and obscure their own mistakes.

Kudrytskyi added he has no doubt that the charges against him would have to be approved by the President’s Office and “could only have been orchestrated on the orders of Zelenskyy.” Zelenskyy’s office declined to respond to repeated requests from POLITICO for comment.

Before his arrest, Kudrytskyi said he was the subject of criticism “by anonymous Telegram channels that support the presidential office with false claims I had embezzled funds.” He took that as the first sign that he would likely be targeted for harsher treatment.

Kudrytskyi, who was released Friday on bail, said the criminal charges against him are “nonsense,” but they’ve been leveled so it will be “easier for the President’s Office to sell the idea that I am responsible for the failure to prepare the energy system for the upcoming winter, despite the fact that I have not been at Ukrenergo for more than a year now.”

“They’re scared to death” about a public outcry this winter, he added.

Competing plans

That public backlash against leadership in Kyiv will be partly justified, Kudrytskyi said, because the struggle to keep the lights on will have been exacerbated by tardiness in rolling out more decentralized power generation.

Kudrytskyi said Ukraine’s energy challenge as the days turn colder will be compounded by the government’s failure to promptly act on a plan he presented to Zelenskyy three years ago. The proposal would have decentralized energy generation and shifted away, as quickly as possible, from a system based on huge Soviet-era centralized power plants, more inviting targets for Russian attacks.  

Thirty-nine-year-old Volodymyr Kudrytskyi said he’s one of those whom the President’s Office is looking to scapegoat. | Kirill Chubotin/Getty Images

The plan was centered on the idea that decentralizing power generation would be the best way to withstand Russian missile and drone attacks. Those have redoubled to an alarming scale in recent weeks with, some days, Russia targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure with 500 Iranian-designed drones and 20 to 30 missiles in each attack.

Instead of quickly endorsing the decentralization plan, Zelenskyy instead approved — according to Kudrytskyi — a rival scheme backed by his powerful Chief of Staff Andriy Yermak to “create a huge fund to attract hundreds of millions of foreign investment for hydrogen and solar energy.”

Last year the government shifted its focus to decentralization, eventually taking up Kudrytskyi’s plan. “But we lost a year,” he said. 

He also said the slow pace in hardening the country’s energy facilities to better withstand the impact of direct hits or blasts — including building concrete shelters to protect transformers at power plants — was a “sensational failure of the government.”

Ukrenergo, Kudrytskyi said, started to harden facilities and construct concrete shelters for transformers in 2023 — but little work was done by other power generation companies.

Democratic backsliding

Kudrytskyi was abruptly forced to resign last year in what several Ukrainian energy executives say was a maneuver engineered by presidential insiders determined to monopolize political power.

His departure prompted alarm in Brussels and Washington, D.C. — Western diplomats and global lenders even issued a rare public rebuke, breaking their normal public silence on domestic Ukrainian politics. They exhorted Kyiv to change tack.

So far, international partners have made no public comments on Kudrytskyi’s arrest and arraignment. But a group of four prominent Ukrainian think tanks issued a joint statement on Oct. 30, the day after Kudrytskyi’s arraignment, urging authorities to conduct investigations with “the utmost impartiality, objectivity, and political neutrality.” 

The think tanks also cautioned against conducting political persecutions. In their statement they said: “The practice of politically motivated actions against professionals in power in any country, especially in a country experiencing the extremely difficult times of war, is a blow to statehood, not a manifestation of justice.”

The embezzlement case against Kudrytskyi has been described by one of the country’s most prominent anti-corruption activists, Daria Kaleniuk, head of the Anti-Corruption Action Center, as not making any legal sense. She argued that the prosecutor has failed to offer evidence that the former energy boss enriched himself in any way and, along with other civil society leaders, said the case is another episode in democratic backsliding.

Overnight Sunday, Russia launched more attacks targeting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, striking at regions across the country. According to Zelenskyy, “nearly 1,500 attack drones, 1,170 guided aerial bombs, and more than 70 missiles of different types were used by the Russians to attack life in Ukraine just this week alone.” Unlike previous wartime winters, Russian forces this time have also been attacking the country’s natural gas infrastructure in a sustained campaign. 

Since being forced to resign from Ukrenergo, Kudrytskyi hasn’t been shy about highlighting what he says is mismanagement of Ukraine’s energy sector. For that he has been attacked on social media for being unpatriotic, he said. But he sees it differently.

“Most Ukrainians understand the government should be criticized even during wartime for mistakes because otherwise it would cause harm to the country,” he said.