Amid relentless Russian attacks on the Ukrainian power grid, workers defy drones, separation from their families and the constant fear of death
Anthony Loyd
December 6, 2025
The Times
As the last of Pokrovsk’s electricians drift off to sleep, the puttering whine of drones and the rumble of artillery penetrate their fading consciousness. Explosions interrupt their dreams. The morning brings little reprieve. “We go to sleep wondering if we will wake up at dawn,” said Vitalii, chief electrical engineer of the Donbas Fuel Energy Company (DTEK) operation in Pokrovsk. “Then, come the morning, we go to work in places where others who shared the same fears of the night were killed in their beds.” “But we know the value of our job to our people,” he added, getting one of his teams ready to travel into the red zone on Pokrovsk’s northwestern flank, where a clutch of Russian Shahed drones had severed power lines overnight. “One of the main Russian aims is to take down our power grid. They bomb our substations and destroy our lines every night. Every day we try to fix them and get the lights back on. No light is no life.”
Vitalii donned his flak jacket, adorned with good-luck charms, and grabbed a handful of cartridges for his shotgun to use against drones. His men checked their cable strippers, wire cutters and voltage testers, and drove off with him into the lapping tideline of the war’s violence. It was not long before their drone alarms began to squawk in warning. Vitalii paused for a moment and looked at the screen of one alarm, which picks up the live feed from the camera in Russian first-person view (FPV) drones. “If you see yourself on the screen, you know you’re in trouble,” he joked, then set off on his first job of the day.
Grid war
Unsung heroes of the war in eastern Ukraine, the electricians of DTEK have assumed a vital frontline role in keeping the lights on and the power running. Russian attacks on the Ukrainian energy grid have escalated as winter approaches. The Kremlin is trying to pummel Ukrainian morale, hitting thermal power plants and conducting daily strikes on electricity substations. More than 160 energy workers have been killed and over 300 injured since the start of Russia’s full- scale invasion in 2022. At least seven of the dead and 88 of the wounded were working for DTEK.
Donbas, the eastern part of Ukraine that is the focal point of the war, is the worst hit of all. In the past week alone, DTEK electricians have restored electricity to 23,000 families in Ukrainian-controlled areas of the Donetsk region.
The high-risk red zones of Ukraine’s battle-scarred eastern front are a world away from the corruption scandal involving officials from the state-owned energy company Energoatom, who
have been accused of taking multimillion-dollar kickbacks from suppliers in return for contracts. The controversy has led to the resignation of Andriy Yermak, President Zelensky’s former chief of staff. “I’ve seen it all while at work in the last year: blood, destruction, FPVs, shellfire; a Shahed drone detonating 500 metres away,” said Oleksandr, 51, one of the DTEK team. “A few weeks ago a Russian FPV came and buzzed our van looking for us as we hid in a shelter. Our soldiers shot it down.”
Only a few dozen electricians from Pokrovsk’s original team continue to work with Vitalii in a shrinking swathe of Donetsk. Most of the city now lies in Russian hands and the Russian offensive continues. “It is the Russian style of victory,” said Vitalii. “Demolish and destroy.”
His team still possess their DTEK T-shirts emblazoned with the words “The courage to bring you light”. Yet the loss of their homes to Russian artillery or drones, and separation from their families who have been evacuated westwards, bites hard among those who remain. “We are tired now,” added Oleksandr. “We are exhausted. We are not finished but for many of us our greatest wish is just to be able to spend time with our families.”
The commute
The electricians’ commute to work passes through the same Ukrainian-held areas of the region of Donetsk that are the main sticking point in the stalled US-led peace talks.
Drone netting, severed in places, shrouded the roads. The occasional wrecks of incinerated vehicles, destroyed by FPV kamikaze drones which got through holes in the mesh, lay tossed on the verge. Ukrainian trenches pressed up against roads in some areas, while in others huge new belts of fortification — complete with tank traps, concrete dragon’s teeth, pits of barbed wire and earthen berms — were being constructed at frantic speed to stall the Russian advance.
Along the way Vitalii recounted the fate of friends and colleagues. One had died trying to put out the flames in his house in Pokrovsk; another had been suffocated by smoke as he sheltered in his basement from Russian shelling. An electrician had been killed by landmine as he tried driving his mother to safety; another was slain in an airstrike. As he spoke, the sound of shelling and rocket fire was regular and insistent. The drone alarms squawked repeated warnings; the people became fewer and fewer; the destruction ever worse.
A few miles south of the town of Bilozerske, a desolate ruin where fresh graves had been dug in some of the gardens, the DTEK team arrived at their first job. Three Shahed drones had hit a hamlet, severing the power cables. Two houses were obliterated. A soldier’s helmet, badly dented, lay in the rubble and a thin, nervous farmer stared at the smoking wreckage of one house. He described how two soldiers, one dead, the other seriously wounded, had been pulled from the rubble.
By the gate of a surviving building, a bewildered elderly woman sat in tears and watched the electricians’ arrival with a mix of surprise and shock. “Oh my God,” she wept, explaining that she had lived alone since her only son, a rescue worker, had been killed in shelling earlier in the year. The air was already cold and low fog added to the misery of the scene. “I have nowhere else to go,” she added, as the DTEK team lifted a small crane up to reconnect the severed lines.
The next job was equally bleak. The electricians arrived in a village where a double missile strike had torn apart more cables and a row of houses. As they worked to reconnect the lines, a pack of abandoned dogs tore into one another in the rubble. A cold rain fell and salvoes of Grad rockets fired in the distance. “For a lot of my guys this feels like the last fortress,” said Vitalii. “But still we work. The home I built no longer exists. There is nothing of that home to go back to.”
Anthony Loyd has been writing for the Times for over thirty years. He began his career reporting from the Bosnian war in 1993 and has since worked in multiple conflicts, including those in Ukraine, Chechnya, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Kosovo, Libya, Sierra Leone and the Central African Republic. His special reports have included eye-witness dispatches from the siege of Sarajevo, the genocide in Srebrenica, the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001, the defeat of Islamic State in Mosul, Muammar Gaddafi’s downfall in Libya, and the withdrawal of the US-led coalition from Afghanistan in 2021. Anthony exposed the use of Sarin gas by the Assad regime in Syria in 2013, and later discovered and interviewed Shamima Begum in 2019. His Times multimedia projects have included the short film ‘Another Man’s War’ from Ukraine, and the highly acclaimed podcast series ‘Last Man Standing’. Among his many awards for The Times the reporter has won foreign correspondent of the year five times in the British Press Awards , and twice won the prestigious Prix Bayeux-Calvados for war correspondents.