In autumn 2024, a wave of Russian aerial strikes hit Ukraine’s power system, cutting several nuclear reactors off the grid and forcing one to be shut down entirely. The attacks intensified long-standing anxieties about nuclear plants that depend on continuous external electricity to run cooling systems for reactor cores and spent fuel. If the grid and backup generators both fail, cooling can stop and reactors can overheat — a cascade of failures many feared could echo memories of Chernobyl.
“It wasn’t that we were scared,” says Shaun Burnie, a Greenpeace nuclear specialist who has worked in contaminated sites. “It was that we were terrified.” The trauma of April 26, 1986 — when an explosion at Chernobyl led to mass evacuations and widespread contamination across Europe — remains a potent part of Ukraine’s collective memory. “Chernobyl is part of our collective memory,” says Lena Kondratiuk, 25, from Rivne. “Now, during the war, this meaning has become even more real.”
Despite nuclear energy supplying more than half of Ukraine’s electricity and ongoing plans for new reactors, the worst-case scenarios have been avoided so far. Still, the International Atomic Energy Agency labelled the situation “the world’s biggest threat to nuclear safety.” At the same time, more than half of the country’s generating capacity has been damaged or destroyed, forcing officials, companies and communities to find ways to keep power flowing under fire.
Centralized generation — whether nuclear, coal or gas — concentrates very large amounts of power in a few locations, making those sites attractive targets. That vulnerability has strengthened calls to decentralize and to expand renewables, which can be harder to neutralize, faster to repair and quicker to deploy. Chris Aylett, an energy specialist at Chatham House, points out that a single missile can disable a 250-megawatt coal plant, whereas the same capacity spread across many wind turbines or solar arrays would require many more strikes. Damaged solar equipment can often be replaced panel by panel, he says, making rapid recovery more feasible.
Those practical considerations have translated into action on the ground. Energy firms, NGOs and local communities have accelerated rooftop solar installations on hospitals, schools and municipal buildings. In 2025, Ukraine installed enough rooftop solar to supply the equivalent of more than one million homes, even as attacks continued.
Kondratiuk has been part of that effort since her late teens. She joined the environmental NGO Ecoclub as a volunteer at 18 and became a renewables analyst in 2020. After Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ecoclub shifted from policy advocacy to direct delivery, launching the Solar Aid for Ukraine campaign to help towns coping with routine outages. She took on project management responsibilities in her early 20s, describing her work as urgent and deeply personal: “because of the war, because I understand that, for example, I can die tomorrow.”
Her projects have taken her across the country, including to Mykolaiv, roughly 60 kilometres from the front line, where she arrived to find a city under shelling and reliant on diesel generators. She travels there monthly despite risks and restricted movement, motivated by the resilience she sees. “They teach that even during wartime, it’s still possible to find happy moments and carry on,” she says.
Ecoclub and partners have helped install nearly 90 solar systems in communities where the technology has become essential infrastructure rather than an optional environmental upgrade. Hybrid solar-plus-battery systems now keep water-pumping stations running through blackouts, allow hospitals to power critical equipment, and help families keep phones charged to stay in touch. One Ecoclub installation at a care home for women with mental health and neurological conditions transformed daily life: staff no longer had to prepare meals hours in advance to manage outages, and residents could count on warm food and consistent services.
Analysts see Ukraine’s wartime experience as a case study for broader energy-security planning. The main lesson is that geographic dispersion increases resilience: a distributed system is less vulnerable to single-point attacks or failures. Complementing renewables with storage, stockpiling and standardising replacement parts to speed repairs, and designing grids so recovery takes weeks rather than months are all practical measures informed by the conflict.
Aylett frames Ukraine’s choices within global energy politics. Disruptions to fossil-fuel supplies and the war itself underline the benefits of rapid decarbonisation and a faster rollout of renewables across Europe and beyond. He is pragmatic about the role of nuclear in places where it already provides a large share of electricity, such as France, arguing that the priority should be to expand secure, low-carbon capacity while reducing vulnerability.
For Ukrainians like Kondratiuk, the work goes on amid conflict and memory. She says she’s relieved to have been born after Chernobyl, even as she lives through another national tragedy. Looking ahead, she wants to keep rebuilding — and to do it greener and better after the war: “I still want to help my country, still want to continue my work at Ecoclub, and I still think that even after the war and after our victory, there will be even more work because we have to rebuild the country and rebuild it in a greener and better way.”
Adapted from an episode of DW’s Living Planet podcast. Edited by Tamsin Walker.