Ukraine envoy pushes back on worst-case scenario predictions for winter

Denys Sienik, Ukraine’s charge d’affaires to the United States, pushed back against some Ukrainian officials’ predictions of an apocalyptic winter for the country, saying Kyiv and other cities wouldn’t depopulate.Sienik, who serves as Ukraine’s most senior official in the U.S. after former ambassador Olha Stefanishyna left her position in August, cast a defiant picture of Ukraine on Thursday. Ukraine has claimed for months that Russia’s war plan for the winter is to destroy the country’s energy grid, making major cities effectively unlivable in the coldest months to bring the country to its knees. Some Ukrainian officials have predicted the complete depopulation of some cities in the winter months, but the Ukrainian government doesn’t predict the same foreboding outcome.Responding to a question from the Washington Examiner, Sienik first touched on his personal experiences in Kyiv during the war before he came to the U.S. He lived in the capital during Russia’s first air campaign against Ukraine’s power grid, which strained the country and triggered periods of blackouts. “I perfectly know, unfortunately, what it is like to be five, six days without electricity and water in cold weather in December,” he said.Fears of a mass exodus from major cities are “what the Russians want to achieve, and that’s the message they like to spread, that’s for sure,” he said, adding, “No, Kyiv will not be depopulated.”“We have shown our resilience already many times, and nothing will change,” Sienik said. “We’re fighting for our independence. Whether life will become more difficult? It will, definitely. I’m talking in particular about Ukrainian children.”The winter campaign against the energy grid will only make Ukrainians more resilient, he claimed. “I believe many people in the West underestimate the resilience of Ukrainians,” Sienik said.However, he acknowledged that this year’s energy campaign was already different from previous rounds in its severity. While previous attacks against power plants and substations largely used drones that caused significant but repairable damage, many of the most recent rounds have seen complete annihilation. He pointed to a recent attack on three thermal power plants, which saw them reduced “to ashes.”The destruction of power plants, often with ballistic missiles, would make the repairs that kept most of the power grid online in previous years impossible. Officials have been warning that the Russian air campaign could expand to the water and sewage supply, which Sienik acknowledged as a major concern of Kyiv.“My biggest fear is that the biggest Ukrainian cities will be without electricity, and water supply, and heating, if not for weeks, then for days for sure,” he said.The attacks reflected Russia’s new approach to the war, Sienik argued, which he called “super cruel.”Sienik’s briefing coincided with Kyiv experiencing a major crisis with its water supply, after a Russian attack on the power grid crippled its water supply temporarily. Mykhailo Yatsuk, director of the Institute of Water Problems and Land Reclamation, told the Kyiv Independent that the crisis was “the most serious water outage in Kyiv since the war began.”“The problem is that the energy grid is not stable and is being repaired at the moment. The damages are the consequence of the attacks over the last 3 months. Meanwhile, repair work is limited because of constant attacks,” Oleksandr Kharchenko, director of the Energy Industry Research Center, told the outlet.Sienik’s rebuttal that Ukrainian cities wouldn’t depopulate is one of the first, if not the first, pushes back against the apocalyptic predictions of many other officials who aren’t part of the government. One of the most explicit warnings came from Ukrainian member of Parliament Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze, chairwoman of Ukraine’s committee on integration into the European Union, who said in September during a trip to Ottawa, Canada, that entire cities could become unlivable and empty out, as she said was Russia’s goal.“We could have humanitarian disasters of the magnitude that nobody has seen,” she said.City officials themselves have been some of the most pessimistic, including Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko. In an Oct. 8 interview with AFP, he warned that the city was in “survival mode” and openly urged residents to consider temporarily relocating during the winter to help deal with the crisis. He urged these measures so he wouldn’t have to order a full-scale evacuation, which he said would benefit Russian President Vladimir Putin.Ukrainian Energy Minister Denys Shmyhal claims Ukraine intercepted Russia’s plans for the winter that made explicit its intention of forcing mass exoduses from Ukraine’s major cities.HOW RUSSIA TURNED THE TIDE OF THE SUMMER AIR WAR IN UKRAINEOleksiy Kucherenko, first deputy chairman of the Rada energy committee, gave a bleak view of the winter ahead this week, telling the Rada that it’s impossible to predict the scale and duration of winter power outages. An estimate from the committee, cited by Sud.ua, said the planning horizon for energy workers currently stands at just one day. It identified the water supply as a central vulnerability of the system.Kyiv is in the worst position, as it’s almost entirely reliant on other parts of the country for its energy needs. The energy committee said that the capital region’s own power generation can only cover about 10%-15% of its needs.