An Energy System Under Double Strikes

In March 2024, the Russian army unleashed massive attacks on the Ukrainian energy sector. On March 22, the Zmiyivska and Kharkiv thermal power plants in the Kharkiv region were destroyed. At the same time, the Dnieper hydroelectric power plant was hit, which caused the plant’s operation to be suspended.

Then in May 2024, there was a decrease in the water level in the Dniester reservoir. The inflow to the reservoir was only about 30 percent of normal. Ukrainian power engineers cited two main reasons: Russian attacks on the energy system and dry weather. The water had to be released to stabilize the country’s energy system. Surely, it had faced the threat of increased heat load before — for example, in 2019, which was at that point the warmest year in Ukraine on record. A drop in power generation at the Dniester Hydroelectric Power Plant due to low water levels also occurred in summer 2022.

But last summer, Ukraine’s energy sector was under an even stronger double blow. In July, temperatures exceeded 38 degrees Celsius in many regions. Hourly blackout schedules were introduced to stabilize the energy system. At the same time, not only generation facilities — power plants — but also substations and power lines came under fire.

In the city of Kamenskoye in the Dnipropetrovsk region, power outages became so critical that on July 12, residents protested against irregular power cuts. The power grids could not cope with the increased load. Electricity was to be supplied according to schedules, but these were often disrupted as previous schedules could no longer be maintained due to power shortages. Some households in the city were without electricity for eighteen to twenty hours a day. Stabilization blackouts overlapped with emergency blackouts caused by the heat wave.

On July 15, the heat wave caused transformers at the South Ukrainian nuclear power plant to burn down, and then one of the plant’s power units had to be shut down. On July 16, state-owned electricity operator Ukrenergo introduced emergency power cuts in seven regions. The fighting interrupted power supply in the Dnipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhya, Sumy, Kharkiv, and Kherson regions. Hourly energy supply schedules were constantly disrupted due to emergency power outages. The heat wave then receded somewhat, before returning in the second half of August. With it, weather-related power outages also came back.

The Ukrainian army, in turn, also launched drone strikes on the Russian power grid. The combination of the two factors — heat and drones — particularly affected southern Russia. On July 6, due to the heat wave, a power outage schedule was introduced in the Rostov region due to an “energy shortage.” On July 9, Ukrainian drones damaged two transformers in the Rodionovo-Nesvetai district of the Rostov region.

On the evening of July 16, a severe heat wave caused an emergency automatic shutdown (the automatic system tripped) of the nuclear reactor N1 at the Rostov atomic plant, which left more than 2.5 million people in neighboring regions without electricity. Starting from July 18, a temporary schedule of power outages was again introduced in the Rostov region. The blackouts also affected Rostov’s southern neighbors: on July 17, an emergency schedule was introduced in Krasnodar, and on August 2, drones damaged a substation in the Tikhoretsk District of the Krasnodar Krai.

Abnormal — or, to be precise, new normal — heat waves hit southern Russia for the second summer in a row. In 2023, the “heat stroke” led to power outages and protests in Dagestan, the Volgograd region, Rostov, and other southern Russian regions. At the same time, water pumps were failing in some settlements, leaving people without water in 40-degree heat. Locals in the south of the country note that this problem has been present for some time already.

July 2024 was also full of heat and unrest. In Bataysk (Rostov region), residents marched late in the evening to the office of local energy company Donenergo demanding the resumption of the electricity supply. The next day, protests erupted in Krasnodar as locals blocked streets to show their discontent over power outages. In Anapa — a resort town on the Black Sea — people also blocked the streets, allowing only emergency vehicles through. In Khasavyurt, Dagestan, a transformer burned down due to the heat, and seventy thousand residents of the city and surrounding areas were left without electricity. The energy system in the Russian South simply does not have enough capacity to withstand the increased load caused by heat and or drone strikes on the infrastructure.

The Russian Hydrometeorological Center’s report for 2021 stated that summer season climate change is the fastest in the country’s Southern Federal District. At the same time, high rates of population growth are also recorded there, which creates an additional load on the energy sector. Climate change is already becoming a factor in protests. It’s just that people don’t formulate their discontent in terms of the climate crisis specifically. What matters to them is that there is a stable supply of electricity and water. In their view, the main culprits for the disruptions are local administrations and their poor performance.

Russian meteorologists also detailed the climate risks for infrastructure in their 2017 report. “The expected increase in summer temperature extremes, which entails building overheating, significantly increases the risk of systemic accidents arising from a simultaneous sharp increase in energy consumption, reduced power generation, and high losses on power transmission lines,” the authors concluded.

The problem is aggravated by the high wear and tear of power grids, as well as generating and distribution equipment. Oleg Shein, a former representative for the Astrakhan region in the Russian Duma — and recently declared a “foreign agent” — also points to the management fragmentation of the energy system after the reform as the reason for outages: “Now, in place of the single monopolistic electricity provider [the dominant supplier from 1992 to 2008], about three dozen different companies have been created, of which only two are state-owned. The chain itself looks like this: the consumer pays to the energy sales company, which is only responsible for collecting money and transferring it to the state-owned grid company Rosseti, while Rosseti settles accounts with generating companies.’’

The drop in electricity generation at hydroelectric power plants and emergencies at nuclear power plants due to heat waves are not only occurring in Ukraine and Russia. All over the world, energy infrastructure is under additional pressure due to heat waves: summer heat leads to skyrocketing demand for electricity in France, strain on power grids and plants in the United States, Australia, Africa, China, and India grows as well. The energy infrastructure built in the twentieth century was ill-prepared for the climate stress of the twenty-first.

Heat and Dust

In 2023, as the advances of both armies at the front slowed down, the media popularized talk of a “war for square kilometers.” This phrasing means not only trench warfare across barely moving front lines, but also burning fields and woods. The forest belts planted in Soviet times usually serve as natural cover under which trenches are being dug. Drones buzz above them: both warring sides are targeting the forest plantations with incendiaries. The soil — Zaporizhzhya, Donetsk, Kherson, and Kharkiv soil — piles up in the trench. The soil turns to dust.

The soil was turning into dust even before the war. Wind and water erosion is a serious problem in the steppe south of Ukraine, part of the wider Black Sea-Caspian steppe region. Dust storms are common in Eastern and Southeastern Ukraine, but in 2020 a dust storm hit Kyiv. Among the causes of the storm were the demolition of Soviet-era forest belts in the Kyiv region and excessive plowing that led to soil erosion.

After the land reform of the 1990s, the privatization and restructuring of agriculture in Ukraine led to the formation of large agricultural holdings. Now 60 percent of agricultural land is owned by agro-holdings cultivating monocultures (wheat, barley, corn, or even sunflower) for export and withdrawing profits offshore. The level of plough disturbance in Ukraine has been high since the Soviet times, with about 54 percent of Ukrainian land plowed (according to official data). The actual level is even higher due to illegal plowing.

For the sake of high yields, land is being depleted, resulting in the destruction of soil cover and a decrease in the ecological sustainability of agro-landscapes. According to a team of Ukrainian and Polish scientists, the area size of degraded and infertile land with signs of desertification has already reached ten million hectares.

Now, the consequences of the post-Soviet reforms are overlapping with the effects of climate change and war. One of the main environmental damages resulting from the hostilities is to the soil, which is depleted and subjected to erosion through the use of explosives, heavy machinery, and building of the trenches. This severely affects both the structure and microbiology of the soil, leading to wide-ranging consequences from loss of agricultural productivity to desertification.

The 2024 heat wave led to a decline in the harvest of table grapes, cereals, and vegetables in the Vinnytsia region. For most Ukrainian producers, the potato crop dropped by up to 30 percent. Next year’s harvest in the Kirovograd region is under threat. In the Kharkiv region, the wheat and potato harvest was halved due to severe drought in 70 percent of sown areas. The heat wave above 30 degrees Celsius lasted for two months. The actual drought — a shortage of precipitation — lasted from June through October.

The National Academy of Agrarian Sciences explicitly links the drought to climate change, pointing to the steady recurrence of droughts in Ukraine over the past twenty years. Drought-related food inflation in Ukraine rose sharply in September and October. Now, the National Bank of Ukraine expects food inflation to accelerate by the second quarter of 2025.

In the Russian part of the Black Sea-Caspian Sea region, climate aridization and desertification are also a recurring problem, taking place in Kalmykia, in the eastern and southeastern parts of the Rostov region, in the Volgograd region, Stavropol Krai, Chechnya, and Dagestan. The frequency and intensity of droughts accompanied by dust storms and shallowing of water bodies are increasing. In addition to climate change, anthropogenic pressure on ecosystems, such as overgrazing and excessive plowing, aggravates matters. On top of that, in the Russian south — just like in Ukraine — land reclamation systems have degraded over time, and irrigated areas have been reduced.

The summer 2024 heat wave slashed vegetable and cereal harvests in Russia’s southern regions: the Rostov region, Ingushetia, and North Ossetia. In the Belgorod region, Kursk region, and Voronezh region, the authorities declared an emergency due to the atmospheric and soil drought that lasted from July through September. In July, the head of the Russian Agriculture Ministry, Oksana Lut, urged farmers “to pray and light candles in churches” in order to save the crops. Despite such efforts, the harvest in the Black Earth Region ended up being the worst in over a decade.

Meanwhile, representatives of the Russian insurance business are also talking about the increasing frequency of extreme events threatening agriculture. According to the National Union of Agroinsurers, “the number of emergencies resulting in damage to crops has increased 1.6 times since the beginning of 2024 compared to the whole of 2023 and reached 29 cases in 26 regions of the country.” Climate inflation is already here, and it has permeated the economies of both warring parties.

Water and Steam

In July 2024, the water level in the Seversky Donets River dropped significantly. As a result of dam failures and heat, the river became shallow. Seversky Donets is a transboundary river that flows through the territory of both warring states. It has its source in Russia, then flows through the Ukrainian regions of Kharkiv, Donetsk, and Luhansk to make another bend before flowing into the Russian Don River.

In the same month, the Saksagan River (a second-order tributary of the Dnieper) in the Kamensky District of the Dnipropetrovsk region — the one whose residents protested over power outages — became critically shallow. Due to high temperatures and a lack of precipitation, other Ukrainian rivers also shoaled and dried up.

Ukraine’s largest waterway, the Dnieper, was experiencing serious problems even before the war: the river’s water level dropped in 2016 and 2019. The Dnieper itself is a cascade of reservoirs, a huge mechanism that provides electricity generation, irrigation, and navigation needs. As the climate warms, the evaporation rate from the surface of the reservoirs increases.

In June 2023, Russian troops launched a devastating attack on the Kakhovka hydroelectric dam. Apart from the flooding, the dam collapse led to a spill of “some 150 tonnes of toxic industrial lubricants . . . alongside contaminants from sewage pits, petrol stations, and agrochemical and pesticide stores, as well as dislodged landmines.” Approximately ten thousand hectares of agricultural land was lost. The dam collapse was the largest environmental disaster in Ukraine since Chernobyl.

But these are far from the only consequences: the dam’s destruction adds to the negative effects of climate change in Ukraine. Some Ukrainian scientists expect a new ecosystem to form at the bottom of the Kakhovka reservoir. In their reasoning, they refer to the fact that a willow and poplar forest has grown on the former bottom of the reservoir in a year. This will be a return to the Great Meadow — the story goes — an ecosystem that existed before the Kakhovka reservoir and took an important place in the history of the Ukrainian Cossacks. A blessing in disguise, etc.

However, there is a more pessimistic outlook as well. Svitlana Krakovska, a well-known Ukrainian climatologist, believes that climate change will still lead to the degradation of this ecosystem. Climate models show that the lower Dnieper basin will become warmer and drier. This means that the willows and poplars that grow at the bottom of the vanished reservoir will wither as the groundwater line drops. “Of course, there will be a different ecosystem,” she says. “But I’m afraid it’s impossible to go back to what was there in the mid-20th century.”

The scientists from the Kherson State Agrarian and Economic University in Kherson (Vitalii Pichura, et al.) drew a similar conclusion in their study of the water deficit in the conditions of climate change. While a model built by scientists from Potsdam University showed that even “under a mild scenario, river flow will decrease in most river basins in Ukraine by the middle and end of the 21st century.”

For their part, Ukrainian power engineers insist on the restoration of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant and the reservoir. The director of the Institute of Hydrobiology of Ukraine, Serhiy Afanasyev, also believes that the reservoir should be restored. In addition to its role in the energy sector, the reservoir was connected to the irrigation system of the dry steppe zone.

Now the Kherson, Zaporizhzhya, and Dnipropetrovsk regions have lost this source of irrigation. The military destruction of the irrigation systems only further aggravates the situation. As the climate warms and becomes drier, irrigation needs will increase not just in Southern, but also in Central and Western Ukraine. It will be necessary not only to recreate and modernize old reclamation/irrigation systems but also to create new ones.

On the Russian side of the border, the Tsimlyansky and Kuibyshev reservoirs, the Don and the Volga River systems are facing drought problems. Rivers, hydropower cascades, irrigation works, forest plantations, and fields form a coherent system. Recurring heat and active river basin development increase the load on the river systems — no water flows into them. Small rivers feeding the Volga and Don Rivers dry up or simply disappear.

Ukrainian missiles did not hit Volga dams and hydropower plants. But, in the summer of 2023, the water level decrease in Volga was so drastic that it triggered a dispute over water use between the upper and lower Volga regions, especially between Tatarstan and the Astrakhan region. Tatarstan and other upper Volga regions are interested in high water levels due to energy and shipping considerations, while the Astrakhan region would rather have a full-water regime for better fish farming. Volga forms an even larger mechanism than Dnieper, consisting of a cascade of thirteen reservoirs. In the end, the federal government had to intervene to resolve the dispute.

The decline in the volume of river flow in the Volga River is associated with the decrease in water level in the Caspian Sea, which has been happening since 2006. The lowering and raising of the water level in the Caspian Sea is cyclical, and the sea has gone through periods of retreat (regression) many times before. Now the effects of climate change are superimposed on these cycles. Shoaling threatens ecosystems, but it also threatens Russian transportation and logistics projects embedded in geopolitical and geo-economic rivalries, such as the North-South international transportation corridor.

Due to the decreased flow into the Don River, the freshwater supply to the Sea of Azov, which is shared by the two warring states, is decreasing. In recent years, the water level in the Tsimlyansk Reservoir (the sole hydro plant in the Don basin) has dropped several times. Its waters are used to cool the Rostov nuclear power plant, power the Tsimlyansk hydroelectric power plant, irrigate fields, and feed the Volga-Don shipping canal. The very same canal through which ships and boats of the Caspian Flotilla were allegedly transferred to the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea to conduct combat operations against the Ukrainian army.

Peace and Earth

Huge material, financial, and human resources are spent on war. Among other important tasks, they could be spent on adaptation to climate change: modernization of energy and transport infrastructure, strengthening of dams, restoration of forest belts, rehabilitation of river ecosystems, replacement of worn-out water supply networks, as well as on training of specialists in relevant areas and new scientific projects.

It is not that it is not being done at all, but is it being done enough? And besides, are the funds being spent correctly? The peculiarities of management — if it can be called that — in Russia have led to the derailing of the federal project “Revitalization of the Volga River,” launched in 2018. The project was beset by a series of scandals in several Russian regions. According to the original plan, it was to be implemented by the end of 2024. One hundred twenty-seven billion rubles (roughly US $1.27 billion) were spent on its implementation. At the time of its completion, of the 121 treatment facilities that were to be built or reconstructed under the project, only six were working. Now the project has been extended until 2030.

In Ukraine, a country poorer than Russia and much harder-hit by the war, the problem of financing environmental and climate projects will be even more acute. When the war is over, it will leave a country with destroyed towns and villages, minefields, damaged soil, and labor shortages.

War and climate change proceed at different speeds. War is faster, bringing destruction and taking human lives at lightning speed. Climate change brings droughts and dust storms, floods, and fires. However, they do not happen every day or every week. The people protesting over water and electricity cuts in Krasnodar, Dagestan, and Kamenskoye, and the fighters on the front lines, sweltering in the trenches, probably do not think about climate change very often.

But war, climate change, and infrastructure degradation form a perfectly destructive combination. Military action itself contributes to additional greenhouse gas emissions. If there were no war, the problems of climate change, infrastructure, rivers, groundwater, and desertification would remain. But they would be easier to solve. War is an accelerator and multiplier of negative effects. Overlapping the scales of war and climate change bring more tragedy, suffering, and loss of life.

The war severed personal networks. It also severed scientific networks, just when they were most needed. For Ukrainian scientists, this rupture was accompanied by feelings of anger. The aforementioned Svitlana Krakovska, in an interview just after the start of the Russian invasion, mentioned her Russian colleague Oleg Anisimov:

By the way, a scientist-delegate from Russia also took the floor [at the international conference of climatologists in 2022]. He said that he was shocked that his country unleashed the war, and that they — the intelligentsia — were also to blame. Because they were engaged in pure science and did not pay attention to the need to build civil society. Although the meeting was a closed one, what happened at the meeting became public. I don’t know what happened to the Russian scientist after that. He must have been seriously punished. When people ask me about it, I answer that I do not care. Although I feel sorry for him — he spoke well, he said everything right.

Polycrisis

Just when I started writing this text, I read about the shrinking of the Great Salt Lake in North America leading to increased greenhouse emissions. The southwestern United States has been in the midst of a severe drought for more than twenty years, which led to a long-running dispute between the seven Colorado River Basin states over water rights. Then, while I was still writing, an article about heat stress causing coral bleaching at Australia’s Great Barrier Reef came out in Nature. A vital marine ecosystem is on its way to death. This list of threats caused by climate change could be easily continued. It will be replenished in reality. There will be more fires, dust storms, droughts, floods, heat waves, and thermal shocks to infrastructure.

In recent years, the term polycrisis has been increasingly used to describe the collision of economic, climatic, military, and other threats, the consequences of which reinforce each other.

If it is possible to identify the most intense hotbeds of polycrisis on the planet, Ukraine is definitely one of them. Two countries are waging war on the (literal) ruins of a progressive project, on a warming planet with degrading ecosystems. Last summer, people were sitting in the heat in trenches, trading drone strikes. This war itself is taking place in the larger context of a growing imperialist rivalry with the threat of nuclear fire. Let’s appreciate the magnitude of the evil joke history has played on us. The question is how we respond to this joke.