LONDON (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump said he plans to speak to Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday and discuss ending the war in Ukraine, with concessions being considered around land and “power plants”, without giving further details.
Ukraine’s energy infrastructure has been the target of large-scale attacks since Russia’s invasion in 2022, resulting in blackouts and freezing conditions for millions of people.
Ukraine has retaliated by launching long-range drone attacks on Russian oil refineries, pumping stations and ports used for oil and gas exports.
Here are some details about energy infrastructure which could be of strategic importance amid ceasefire talks:
UKRAINIAN POWER PLANTS
Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, Zaporizhzhia, which has six units with a capacity of 1 gigawatt each, was occupied by Russian troops in early March 2022.
The plant was shut down in September 2022 due to hostilities near the plant. The shutdown units are maintained with power from Ukraine.
Ukraine’s state-owned firm Energoatom has said it does not know the real state of the equipment, and said the Russian occupation could result in a serious disaster.
The plant lost access to water from the Kakhovka reservoir after a hydroelectric plant was blown up. It has since been using water from the cooler pond, in which the water level is decreasing.
According to engineers’ estimates, the lack of water prevents the start-up of more than two nuclear reactors and it would take at least a year to restart operations as the technical condition of the plant is still unknown.
Ukraine has also lost generation capacity from gas-fired, coal-fired and hydroelectric plants, and several large combined heat and power plants have been damaged or completely destroyed.
GAS INFRASTRUCTURE
Ukraine’s gas transmission system is about 1,000 km long, running from east to west. It was built to deliver gas from Russian gas fields in Siberia to European customers.
The system has capacity to transport up to 140 billion cubic metres (bcm) of gas per year, or around a third of Europe’s demand.
However, volumes have been dropping over the past decades and in 2024, the last year of operation under the transit agreement between Ukraine and Russia, it pumped just 14 bcm of Russian gas.
Ukraine did not want to extend the transit agreement to deprive Russia of export revenues. The system is still used to transport gas inside Ukraine and countries such as Slovakia and Hungary have called for the resumption of Russian gas supplies.
Russian special forces this month used the pipeline to crawl through into the Russian Kursk region in a push to drive out Ukrainian forces who have been occupying a slice of Russian territory since last August.
GAS STORAGE
Most of Europe’s largest underground gas storage facilities, with a capacity of over 30 bcm, are located in western Ukraine.
Kyiv has repeatedly offered European and American companies the use of a third of the storage facilities to store their gas.
In 2023, about 3 bcm of non-resident gas was stored in Ukraine storage facilities, but the volume fell to almost zero in 2024 after Russia sharply stepped up attacks on infrastructure.
The facilities have been in focus since the Trump administration came to power, particularly to store U.S. LNG.
RUSSIAN OIL INFRASTRUCTURE
Ukrainian drone attacks targeting Russian refineries as well as oil depots and industrial sites have risen since January.
The attacks knocked out up to around 10% of Russian refining capacity during some weeks of February when the refineries were hit the hardest, Reuters calculations based on traders’ data showed.
Ukraine also attacked Russia’s limited oil storage as well as pipelines and pumping stations, disrupting flows to export ports and refineries, traders said.
Recent Ukrainian drone attacks also disrupted oil flows via the Druzhba pipeline which still ships Russian oil to Hungary, Slovakia and Czech Republic, as well as through its major oil terminal in Ust-Luga port. Damage to Russian oil export infrastructure could cut Moscow’s revenue from its energy sales.
A Ukrainian drone attack in February also damaged a pumping station of the Caspian CPC pipeline in southern Russia – a main route for Kazakhstan’s oil shipped also by the U.S. and European companies that have projects in the state.
(Reporting by Nina Chestney in London, Pavel Polityuk in Kyiv and Reuters reporters in Moscow; editing by Ros Russell)
