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In the cavernous turbine hall of a coal-fired thermal power plant, deputy chief engineer Oleksandr runs through the extensive damage, pointing out various consequences of numerous Russian strikes over the past two years.

Machinery is covered in thick dark streaks of grime, the residue of heating insulation that burned and rained down on the equipment. A roof girder, 10 metres long, is impaled in the floor. Oil tanks and machines are strafed with shrapnel marks.

“A power station is a tricky thing, there were always small things going wrong and things you had to fix, but we could never have imagined anything like this in our worst nightmares,” said Oleksandr, who has worked for 27 years at the plant.

Before the war, even a small leak from the roof would have been seen as an emergency situation, said Oleksandr, with “everyone running around trying to sort it”. Now, rain falls from the open sky, pooling on the floors, as much of the roof has been destroyed in strikes.

Russia has been systematically targeting Ukraine’s energy system since the start of the full-scale war, leading to regularly scheduled blackouts and frequent emergency power cuts. Even in Kyiv, hospitals and schools, as well as most businesses, now have generators to keep the power going during blackouts.

‘We could never have imagined anything like this in our worst nightmares,’ said Oleksandr, deputy head of the power plant. Photograph: Simona Supino/The Guardian

Two massive attacks on energy in November have again brought the issue into focus, raising fears of a dark and cold winter ahead. Every time the Russians attack, the workers at Ukraine’s power plants rush to try to repair the damage.

It’s an exhausting and expensive routine, but one that Ukraine has become adept at managing, with international help.

“Ukraine’s energy companies have done a very good job in terms of repairing damaged facilities and constructing new ones. The situation seems to be much better than we could have imagined six months ago,” said Andrian Prokip, a Kyiv-based energy expert with the Kennan Institute in Washington DC.

A section of a thermal power plant after a Russian rocket strike. Photograph: Simona Supino/The Guardian

But there are two key variables that could make things worse. First is the temperature. So far, the winter has been relatively mild, but temperatures as low as -10C are expected this weekend, and a long cold snap could put additional pressure on the power grid and lead to longer cutoffs.

The other question is whether intensive Russian strikes on the power grid will continue. “I have a feeling that they would like to pressure the Ukrainian power system as much as they can before Trump’s inauguration. The Russians would like Trump to believe that Ukraine is already destroyed,” said Prokip.

About half of Ukraine’s power comes from nuclear energy and, in late November, Russia targeted substations around nuclear power plants, leading Greenpeace to accuse Moscow of “risking a nuclear catastrophe” by forcing the power plants off-grid.

Thermal power plants are another important part of the energy mix. These plants, many of which are owned by the private company DTEK, are Soviet-built behemoths, providing employment for hundreds of residents, many of whom have worked there for decades. When the plants are working, the machines roar and crash in an industrial symphony, with jets of steam whooshing from pipes at various angles.

Ukraine’s energy system has become adept at managing the impact of Russian strikes. Photograph: Simona Supino/The Guardian

Like all Ukraine’s thermal power plants, the DTEK plant visited by the Guardian has been hit multiple times during the war, including in recent months. As part of the conditions of the visit, the Guardian agreed not to name the specific plant, nor to reveal information about what stage the repairs are at.

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There are also strict rules in place for employees, who are forbidden from posting photographs from the workplace or updates on damage caused by strikes – information which could be used by Russia to prioritise future targets. “To be honest, I suspect the enemy knows everything anyway, but we’re not going to help them if they don’t,” said Oleksandr.

At the heart of the plant is the control room, featuring a dizzying array of buttons, screens and retro gadgets. “Imagine how futuristic all this must have looked back in the 1970s,” laughed Oleksandr. “There are these memes online about how everything Soviet is low-quality, but this turned out to be very durable.”

Now the Russians are using Soviet-designed missiles to attack these Soviet-designed plants. When the air raid siren sounds, the workers hurry to the Soviet-era bomb shelter, built with an attack from the west, not the east, on the mind of the planners. The shock wave from one recent strike ripped most of a grand Soviet-era mosaic, extolling the labour force, from the wall.

Even during air alerts, several key workers have to remain at their posts. “It’s expensive and dangerous to turn everything off quickly, and so someone has to stay here to keep control,” said Yevhen, who has worked at the plant for 17 years and stayed behind during a recent missile attack to keep operations running.

‘At the beginning, it was scary of course, but now we’ve got used to it,’ said Yevhen. Photograph: Simona Supino/The Guardian

It is not work for the faint-hearted. “There was a lot of dust, coal dust, clouds of it everywhere, we couldn’t see a thing. At the beginning, it was scary of course, but now we’ve got used to it. Though that’s not a good thing, you stop being scared and your feelings of self-preservation leave you,” said Yevhen.

Since 2022, three of DTEK’s workers have been killed and 56 injured during their working shifts, according to a company spokesperson. Last month, two employees of state energy outfit Ukrenergo were killed during a Russian attack on an electricity substation in Odesa region.

But the hope is that Ukraine’s ability to repair plants can outstrip Russia’s supply of missiles targeting them. Kyiv has spent the summer, with international support, building fortifications around substations and other key infrastructure. Crews were at work on different elements of repair work when the Guardian visited.

Some of the damage, caused by the direct hits of powerful missiles to parts of the plant, cannot be fixed quickly, however hard the management tries. “Even if the war stopped tomorrow, it would take years of repairs to get this back to the level it was before the start,” said Oleksandr.

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