In autumn 2024, massive Russian aerial attacks struck Ukraine’s energy system, knocking several nuclear reactors off the grid and shutting one down entirely. The strikes raised urgent fears about the safety of nuclear plants that rely on continuous external power to run cooling systems for reactor cores and spent fuel. When the grid fails, generators take over; if those also fail, cooling systems can stop and reactors can overheat.
“It wasn’t that we were scared,” says Shaun Burnie, a Greenpeace nuclear specialist who has worked in highly radioactive sites. “It was that we were terrified.” For Burnie, the real danger was a cascade of failures that could mirror the consequences Ukrainians still remember from Chernobyl. On April 26, 1986, an explosion at the Chernobyl plant forced mass evacuations and contaminated large swathes of Europe — a memory deeply embedded in Ukrainian society. “Chernobyl is part of our collective memory,” says Lena Kondratiuk, a 25-year-old from Rivne. “Now, during the war, this meaning has become even more real.”
Despite nuclear providing more than half of Ukraine’s electricity and plans to build more reactors, the worst-case scenarios have so far been avoided. The International Atomic Energy Agency has called the situation “the world’s biggest threat to nuclear safety.” At the same time, more than half of the country’s power generation capacity has been damaged or destroyed, leaving Ukraine to find ways to keep the lights on under fire.
Because large, centralized generation — whether nuclear, coal, or gas — concentrates huge amounts of power in a few locations, those sites are easy targets. That vulnerability has strengthened arguments for decentralizing power and expanding renewables, which are harder to neutralize, quicker to repair, and faster to deploy. Chris Aylett, an energy specialist at Chatham House, notes that a single missile can take out a 250-megawatt coal plant, whereas it would take many more strikes to disable the same capacity dispersed across wind or solar installations. “If there is damage to that, it doesn’t necessarily need to take everything out — you could swap new panels in,” he says.
Those practical advantages are driving action on the ground. Ukrainian energy companies, NGOs and communities have pushed rooftop solar onto hospitals, schools and public buildings. In 2025, Ukraine installed enough rooftop solar to power more than a million homes, even as attacks continued.
Kondratiuk is part of that movement. She joined the NGO Ecoclub as a volunteer at 18 and became a renewables analyst in 2020. After Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ecoclub shifted from advocacy to direct delivery, launching the Solar Aid for Ukraine campaign to help communities coping with regular outages. At 21 she began managing projects, taking on responsibilities she describes as urgent and personal: “because of the war, because I understand that, for example, I can die tomorrow.”
Her work has taken her across Ukraine, including to Mykolaiv, around 60 kilometers from the front line, where she arrived to a city under shelling and relying on diesel generators. She now travels there monthly despite the risks and restricted transit, drawn by the resilience of people trying to keep life going. “They teach that even during wartime, it’s still possible to find happy moments in your life and continue it,” she says.
Kondratiuk and her colleagues have helped bring nearly 90 solar systems online in communities where they have become essential infrastructure rather than optional green projects. Hybrid solar-and-battery systems keep water utilities running during blackouts, allow hospitals to operate critical equipment, and help families and children charge phones to stay in touch. One Ecoclub installation at a care home for women with mental health and neurological conditions changed daily life: staff no longer had to prepare meals hours in advance to cope with outages, and patients could access warm food and services consistently. “After that, they were happy because they had access to everything,” Kondratiuk says.
Experts studying Ukraine’s experience say the crisis offers lessons for energy security elsewhere. The main takeaway is the value of geographic spread: a more distributed system is more resilient to attacks and failures, regardless of the energy source. Diversifying the energy mix with renewables and storage, stockpiling and standardizing key components for rapid repairs, and designing systems so restoration takes weeks instead of months are all practical measures informed by wartime experience.
Aylett also views Ukraine’s example in the context of global energy politics. The war and disruptions to fossil-fuel supplies, such as conflicts in key shipping regions, underline the case for rapid decarbonization and scaling up renewables in Europe and beyond. He is pragmatic about nuclear’s role where it already supplies large shares of electricity, as in France, saying the aim should be to build out as much low-carbon capacity as possible and make it secure.
For Ukrainians like Kondratiuk, the work continues against a backdrop of conflict and memory. She says she is glad to have been born long after Chernobyl, even as she lives through another national tragedy. She hopes to keep rebuilding — and to do so greener and better after the war: “I still want to help my country, still want to continue my work at the Ecoclub, and I still think that even after the war and after our victory, there would be even more work compared to now because we have to rebuild the country and rebuild it in a greener and better way.”
Edited by: Tamsin Walker
This story was adapted from an episode of DW’s Living Planet podcast.