Russian troops closing in on a Ukrainian power plant, but it’s already been ‘cannibalized’ by crews
As Russian forces advance in the Donetsk region of Ukraine at the fastest rate since the early days of their wide-scale invasion, they have moved to the city of Kurakhove and are about two kilometres from one of the country’s oldest thermal power plants.
Not long after the Kurakhove coal-fired power station opened in 1941, workers were forced to hurriedly disassemble part of it, in a bid to move critical infrastructure to the east before the Nazis swept in and occupied the area.
This past spring and summer, as Russia’s military edged closer, hundreds of workers gathered at the site again to take what they could and transport the equipment to thermal plants in the west that were in desperate need of spare parts after waves of Russian attacks.
“Basically we cannibalized Kurakhove,” said Pavlo Bilodid, who works in international communications at DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private provider of power.
“It was a solution to save the equipment from further attacks and to deliver it to other thermal power plants in Ukraine.”
Waves of attacks
Since March of this year, Ukraine’s energy grid has endured 11 major attacks by Russia. The most recent was early Thursday morning, when nearly 200 drones and missiles targeted sites across the country, leaving more than a million people without power in the immediate aftermath.
With temperatures plunging as winter sets in, there is the threat of widespread power outages if long cold snaps are accompanied by more waves of major attacks.
Throughout the war, which began when Russia invaded its neighbour in February 2022, nearly half of Ukraine’s power-generating capacity has been destroyed, forcing energy workers to make repairs and continue operations under constant threat.
In July 2023, three workers at the Kurakhove plant were killed when a roof collapsed, which Ukrainian authorities blamed on months of Russian attacks.
For the more than 600 workers employed at the facility, the ever-present danger ramped up again dramatically in December 2023, when the plant’s director at the time, Anatoliy Borichevskiy, said that it came under heavy Russian shelling nearly every day.
“When Russians saw the smoke from the chimney, which meant the plant started working, they started to shell immediately,” he said. “The situation was quite tense.”
The decision to dismantle
During a Zoom interview with CBC News, Borichevskiy consulted his black notebook and said that between Dec. 5, 2023 and Jan. 17, 2024, the plant came under shelling 38 times.
When sirens rang out, some workers would race to the shelter, but others had to stay and keep running the control room.
For more than a month, he said, it was a dismal cycle as crews tried to quickly make repairs, only to see the plant hit again.
That changed in March, when the Russian military destroyed a railway bridge that made it impossible to transport coal to the power plant. With invading troops about seven kilometres away, it was too dangerous and made no sense to try to repair the line.
At that point, the discussion was no longer about fixing the plant but about salvaging what they could.
Borichevskiy said he vividly recalled the day he met with managers at the site and told them everyone was now going to be tasked with disassembling part of the plant. They would be removing critical equipment, including generators and transformers that were badly needed elsewhere — including the five other thermal power plants run by DTEK, which had come under Russian attacks.
“It was hard,” said Borichevskiy, who worked at the plant since 1992, when he was first hired as an electrician.
“Everyone understood that we would not be able to work anymore. The front line was approaching. It would not settle quietly.”
As extra crews were brought in to get to work, the looming issue became how to move the equipment — which in some cases weighed a few hundreds tonnes — without being able to use the rail line.
Everything would have to be hoisted on trucks, which meant bridges needed to be surveyed to make sure they could bear the weight, and then strengthened if they couldn’t.
Trucks and tractors were brought in to move out the equipment, as arrangements were made to evacuate the workers and employ them at other energy sites in Ukraine.
Russian forces close in
The city of Kurakhove, which grew in the shadow of the Soviet-era plant, had 18,000 residents before February 2022. Over recent weeks as the Russians grew closer, those who remained in the city left and were evacuated.
Borichevskiy relocated in August, but as many as 100 workers remained at the facility until November.
Last week, Ukrainian officials said the plant came under shelling again, causing destruction to its cooling towers.
Military analysts and Russian pro-war bloggers say that troops are now in Kurakhove. Russia’s Defence Ministry says it has taken control of the settlement of Nova Illinka, which is one kilometre away, on the opposite bank of the reservoir from Kurakhove.
“The place is half-ruined,” said Borichevskiy, who was born and raised in the city.
“Everything there is very sad. I don’t know what will happen next. How will people be able to live there, when everything is half crumbled?”
The race to repair
The focus for DTEK now, along with the rest of Ukraine’s energy operators, is to protect the remaining energy grid and try to minimize the amount of time that large swaths of the country are plunged into darkness.
As of July, 90 per cent of DTEK’s generating capacity was destroyed. Since then, crews worked to rebuild 60 per cent of it, but then came an attack on Nov. 17, which killed at least 11 people and inflicted more damage to the grid.
The U.S. government and European Commission recently announced they would be giving $112 million US to the private company to purchase equipment, including transformers, to help restore capacity.
The managing director of the Kyiv-based Energy Industry Research Center, Oleksandr Kharchenko, said throughout the war, efforts have been made to fortify energy facilities, particularly substations that frequently come under attack.
Work is underway to erect structures made of concrete and steel around them in an effort to protect against drones and missiles.
While Ukrainian cities are undergoing power outages because there isn’t enough capacity or reserves, Kharchenko said, overall the system has responded to Russia’s attacks and will manage through the winter ahead.
“The Ukrainian energy system has huge challenges, but it is fighting them,” he said in an interview with CBC News. “I don’t feel that we will have something like an apocalypse or a huge technological disaster.”
While communities routinely have planned power outages, many residents say they have adapted by running generators and stocking up on battery packs to charge devices.
What is unpredictable, Kharchenko said, is how cold it will get this winter: If temperatures plunge to –10 or –15 C for more than a week, it looks like across Ukraine, there would need to be power outages on average for at least eight hours a day.
Published at Fri, 29 Nov 2024 20:17:02 +0000
His daughter, two others were crushed to death waiting in line to buy bread in central Gaza
Two girls and a woman were crushed to death waiting in a crowd of people outside a bakery in the central Gaza Strip Friday as Palestinians in the war-torn enclave face an increasing threat of famine amid a worsening food crisis.
Osama Abu Al-Laban was with his 17-year-old daughter, Rahaf, in Deir el-Balah Friday, trying to find food to buy.
He said his daughter, wanting to get a loaf of bread, asked him for money before she went to wait in a line of hundreds of people outside al-Banna bakery with her sister.
As she was taking the loaf of bread from her sister, he said she got swept into the crowd.
“[I don’t know] where she went, how she got out, how she got swept in,” Abu Al-Laban told CBC News Friday.
“All of a sudden, [people] got out carrying her. Someone get me to understand what happened here … how did this happen?”
He said his wife fell on the ground when she heard that her daughter suffocated to death.
Zeina Juha, 11, and Nisreen Fayyad, 50, were also crushed to death in the overcrowding and were taken to hospital where a doctor confirmed that they died from suffocation.
“Enough, enough … dear God enough,” Abu Al-Laban wailed outside the hospital.
“This happens to us [over] a loaf of bread,” he said.
Hundreds cram outside bakery to get bread
A crowd of hundreds of Palestinians — children, men and women — crammed outside the bakery, with people shoving, screaming and some climbing a fence to get closer to the beginning of the line.
Umm Muhammad Fayyad was at the hospital to see her niece, Nisreen, one last time. She said her niece was trying to buy a loaf of bread to bring back home to her siblings.
“Isn’t this [wrong], isn’t this injustice? Three of them, not one,” Fayyad told CBC News.
The flow of food allowed into Gaza by Israel has fallen to nearly its lowest level in the almost 14-month-long war during the past two months, according to Israeli official figures.
Women, children scavenging for food in trash: UN
Palestinians across the Gaza Strip are heavily relying on bakeries and charitable kitchens, with many able to only secure one meal a day for their families.
Some bakeries in Gaza were closed for several days last week due to a shortage of flour.
UN and aid officials say hunger and desperation are growing among Gaza’s population, almost all of which relies on humanitarian aid to survive.
On Friday, head of the UN Human Rights office for the Occupied Palestinian Territories Ajith Sunghay, said large groups of women and children are scavenging for food among mounds of trash across the enclave.
“I was particularly alarmed by the prevalence of hunger,” Sunghay told a Geneva press briefing via video link from Jordan, after visiting camps for people recently displaced from parts of northern Gaza.
“Acquiring basic necessities has become a daily, dreadful struggle for survival.”
Canada announces $50M in aid to Gaza, West Bank
Canada’s International Development Minister Ahmed Hussen announced $50 million in humanitarian assistance for Palestinians in Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, saying the money will provide life-saving help such as medical assistance, food, water and protection services. He said the funding will be delivered through partners such as the United Nations and the Red Cross.
Hussen’s office says more funding is needed to deal with “persistent and worsening catastrophic humanitarian conditions” in the territory.
Canada’s International Development Minister Ahmed Hussen on Friday announced a further $50 million in humanitarian assistance to provide food, water and emergency sanitation services for Palestinians in Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Hussen said that brings Canada’s contribution in aid to $215 million since the war began.
His office did not immediately say how much of the funding will go to each territory, and how much will go to UNRWA, an agency supporting Palestinians with which Israel has cut ties.
Hussen said the $50 million pledged will bring Canada’s contribution in aid to $215 million since the onset of the war. But it’s unclear how much of the aid has reached Palestinians, as the access to humanitarian assistance and making sure it reaches the right destinations in the region has proven difficult with recent violent lootings of aid trucks and air drops.
Meanwhile, at least 40 Palestinians were killed in Israeli military strikes overnight and on Friday across the Gaza Strip, many of them in the Nuseirat refugee camp at the centre of the enclave, medics said, after Israeli tanks pulled back from parts of the camp.
More than 44,300 people have been killed and more than 104,000 wounded in the war, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. Israel has destroyed much of the enclave’s infrastructure, forcing most of the 2.3 million population to move several times. The Palestinian civil emergency service estimates that the bodies of 10,000 people may be trapped under the rubble, which would take the reported death toll to more than 50,000.
Israel invaded the Gaza Strip last year following the Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which killed an estimated 1,200 people, according to Israeli authorities, and saw militants abduct more than 250 as hostages. An estimated 100 hostages remain in Gaza.
Published at Fri, 29 Nov 2024 19:18:22 +0000