Ukraine's power generation capacity has collapsed from just under 60GW before the war to just 12GW today. If Russia's missiles get through this winter the way they did last year, the shortfall could nearly double.

Ukraine already has a 5-6GW deficit of power generation between what it can produce and what is needed. Last winter residents in Kyiv were forced to live in homes where the internal temperatures fell to -10°C – there was literally ice on their flat screens. This year it could get a lot worse and many of Ukraine’s major cities could become unliveable. That is Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plan at least, according to Institute for the Study of War (ISW).

Ukraine's energy minister has put the country's total generation capacity at 12GW, down from 14GW before last year’s missile barrage got underway in September.

The 14GW of capacity available was already not enough to cover about 17GW of peak demand - a 3GW shortfall that was already severe enough to force emergency factory shutdowns. Since the warmer weather returned, Russian strikes have knocked out a further 2GW, pushing the deficit to around 5GW. Even if Russia manages to destroy just half of the 12GW that remains, the shortfall would widen to close to 10GW - more than three times last winter's gap.

To put that scale in context, the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant - the largest in Europe, though currently offline and under Russian occupation - has a total capacity of 6GW. Closing a 10GW hole would take the equivalent of one and a half new nuclear power stations, built from scratch in the middle of a war in under six months.

Its no wonder that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is starting to sound a little desperate. He mentions ballistic missiles almost everyday. Now that Ukraine has run out of interceptor missiles, the only thing that can stop Russia’s copious barrages of these powerful and destructive munitions, the major cities are more less defenceless.

Kyiv is racing to plug the gap with distributed, harder-to-hit generation - around 65MW of cogeneration and 16MW of diesel capacity deployed so far - but that is a drop in the ocean of the 5GW shortfall already on the books.

Tit-for-tat escalation

Time is running out. Last years Russian missile onslaught began in Septembet, but this year’s was already well underway at the end of July and has escalated rapidly since then. Russia fired double the number of ballistic missiles in July as it did in June and thanks to its accelerated missile production capacity growth can be expected to increase the pace again from here.

Energy infrastructure is now being deliberately targeted. The renewed campaign against Ukraine's grid intensified over August 8-11, alongside a matching escalation against Russia's own energy infrastructure. Russia hit seven Naftogaz facilities in the east, the Odesa thermal power plant and seven substations, and gas infrastructure at the Bugrovatoe field in Sumy region. The Institute for the Study of War has separately warned of a looming large-scale missile campaign against Kyiv's power supply timed to coincide with Ukraine's August 24 Independence Day.

Ukraine's own deep-strike campaign against Russian oil refining pressed on at the same time, hitting the Rosneft refinery at Syzran in Samara Oblast and the Ilsky refinery in Krasnodar - where the primary AVT-6 crude distillation unit was confirmed damaged - before reaching a petrochemical plant more than 2,000km from the border and, on August 11, an oil refinery over 6,000km away in Russia's Far East, a range President Volodymyr Zelenskiy called "a very significant achievement."

But the two campaigns are not symmetric, as it’s a trade of Ukrainian drones for Russian missiles . Ukraine's drones can damage a refinery, forcing repairs and lost output, but can’t destroy one outright. A Russian ballistic missile can flatten an entire power plant with one direct hit.

In the last month, Kyiv has made up for this shortfall by repeatedly sending large drone waves at the same targets over and over again. But that is expensive and some analysts have asked if Kyiv can afford to keep this strategy up. By some estimates the drone swarms are costing Kyiv $1bn a month and without interceptors, Kyiv’s most valuable economic assets are wide open to attack.

The Russian campaign is already well advanced. Energy Minister Denys Shmyhal told POLITICO in an August 3 interview that Russia has destroyed or damaged more than 80% of Ukraine's power-generation capacity since 2022, citing a pre-war baseline of 54.5GW that has been reduced to as little as 12GW as Kyiv separately appealed for a further €650mn to close a growing winter energy-funding gap.

Europe's gas math doesn't add up either

Ukraine's grid is not the only European energy shortfall building ahead of winter thanks to the Ukraine war. Benchmark Dutch TTF gas prices stand at around €60/MWh as of August 11 - twice their level a year ago and four times pre-war levels - as EU storage tanks sit close to their lowest for early August since records began, with the bloc-wide average at 58% full. As IntelliNews Lambda reported, it’s not an energy crisis yet, but it’s not good either.

EU-wide gas storage levels are very low, but drilling into the country level reserves and the picture is more nuanced. Poland and Italy are already close to the mandatory 90%-full target for November 1, and most of the rest of the bloc is tracking close to its own 15-year seasonal norm. The Netherlands (38% full) and Germany (47%) are the outliers, with next to no realistic chance of reaching 90% on time and together their tanks account for two fifths of total storage – 40% of Europe’s total storage capacity.

That uneven picture sits awkwardly next to Brussels' rhetoric. Europe is at the same time trying to ban imports of Russian gas completely by January 1 and at the same time buying every drop of Russian LNG it can get its hands on.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas continue to press for a full ban on Russian gas imports, even as EU member states have become Russia’s best customers – and paying for their gas in rubles.

The five largest buyers - Hungary, France, Belgium, Spain and Slovakia - together spent an estimated €1.4bn a month on Russian gas at the December benchmark price. Russian gas now accounts for around 13% of the EU's gas mix, down from roughly 35% at its peak but still a meaningful share of the bloc's supply - and of the revenue flowing back to Moscow together with the oil exports, after Greece was calved out of the latest 21st sanctions package oil price cap restrictions cover over 80% of Russia’s military spending in cash.

None of this points to a repeat of 2022's full-blown gas crisis. But between a Ukrainian grid running low on spare capacity and a European Union simultaneously trying to ban and buy the same Russian gas, the region is once again heading into winter with less margin for error than it would like.