“When there is a race between security, so between military and energy, military would always win. Russians would send dozens of drones and dozens of missiles at one single generation facility. So it doesn't matter what changes you were able to make overnight or over past months. It would also be less important how much security you were able to bring to this facility, due to this amount of attacks.”
sputnikintelligence.com
The host asked whether Kyiv's three large combined heat and power plants still operate. Antonenko says he can't give details because much of the information is secret, but explains why hardening a single big plant can't keep up with concentrated attacks.
…transportation and more on grids than being able to generate locally. So the strikes of Russians and the problems of Kyiv currently depend more on not being able to generate and not being able to transmit electricity in full size on time rather than just the overall generation situation in Ukraine.
…they're massive and everybody knows where they are. They're kind of obvious targets for the Russians. Are they currently operational at all? There have been some reporting that none of them generate any electricity right now. How much do we know about what they actually generate at this moment?
So, a large portion of information is secret, and I think this is a good thing because there are obvious reasons. However, you know, defined currently, as we have attacks coming at us almost daily or hourly, should I say, the status would change. Of course, when there is a race between security, so between military and energy, military would always win. Again, for the obvious reasons. Russians would send dozens of drones and dozens of missiles at one single generation facility. So it doesn't matter what the updates or what changes you were able to make overnight or over past months. It would also be less important how secure, so how much security were you able to bring to this facility due to this amount of attacks? So I must say that by now we don't see the lot of generation coming from these facilities. It is minor from the power perspective, not from the heating perspective, because they also supply or supposed to supply heat. From power perspective, we see that they are very much limited to almost not being able to generate anything.
We've both mentioned that this infrastructure is built during the Soviet era. It's incredibly old. I wonder if that has a continuous negative impact on how the system functions. Does that make the repairs more difficult or make the system more vulnerable to the attacks? Is it a big problem that all…
I would say that old is one part of a whole array of problems. If that was the only problem, it is manageable. But the problem is that this multi-crisis rather than a single crisis coming at us. Of course, the Soviet system was a bit different in this giantism that it employed from everywhere, but…
So basically, one of Kyiv's biggest vulnerabilities is that all of the power generation is incredibly centralized and concentrated in a very small number of sites. Is that something that's unique to Kyiv or is this just what all cities in Ukraine deal with? And I'm asking that because I'm wondering…