Ukraine has strengthened the resilience of its energy system as it enters its fifth winter of war, but power shortages are still likely in the coming months, according to a new International Energy Agency report published on November 4. The agency said Ukraine has expanded distributed electricity generation, storage and strategic reserves, while Russia has intensified attacks on energy infrastructure and begun using faster, jet powered drones that are harder to intercept.
The attacks have already damaged power generation assets, electricity networks, gas facilities and oil infrastructure ahead of the heating season, the report said, and the severity of shortages will depend on the intensity of attacks and on weather. More than 30 percent of Ukrainian households rely on district heating, which has come under increasingly heavy attack over the past two winters.
The IEA’s central recommendation is operational rather than capital: some of the most effective measures for this winter involve making better use of assets Ukraine already has. For the following winter the timeline is tighter than it looks, because critical energy equipment takes six to nine months to deliver, so procurement for the 2027-28 heating season should begin now.
For energy markets the read through is demand and risk, not Ukrainian supply. A cold winter with damaged generation means stronger Ukrainian calls on European gas and electricity interconnections at exactly the point in the season when European storage is drawn down, and the report frames that exposure as a planning assumption rather than a tail risk.