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Generators are as important as armour in helping Ukraine survive Vladimir Putin’s energy terror this winter, Volodymyr Zelenskiy has told an emergency conference in Paris convened to coordinate infrastructure and humanitarian aid to the country over the next four months.
The Ukrainian president said the country needed an additional €800m (£686m) to survive the winter and €1.5bn to restore the long-term damage to the energy grid.
The aim of the conference is to set up an international coordination mechanism to ensure Ukraine secures the right mix of generators, transformers, equipment for the restoration of high-voltage networks, and gas turbines.
“We will do everything to counter the blackout and the energy terror. Most of our power plants are damaged or destroyed by the bombings,” Zelenskiy said in an address to the conference by video link.
“Every day our engineers have to disconnect millions of Ukrainians for these repairs. Currently there are 12 million. And every day we expect new Russian strikes. That’s why the generators have become as important as armour to protect the population.”
Energy experts say the key task for Ukraine is not to avoid black-outs but to ensure that each day all neighbourhoods are receiving at least three hours of electricity, which requires a complicated distribution of the grid.
The French-inspired conference designed to coordinate humanitarian aid to Ukraine and is being attended by more than 40 countries and 30 multilateral bodies. A separate conference is to be held later on Tuesday on the long-term reconstruction of the country.
The Russian bombardment has not so far led to a second wave of mass refugees, according to latest figures from the EU’s Frontex agency cited by the Warsaw University migration expert Maciej Duszczyk.
