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Russian strikes on Ukraine’s power grid will continue without President Trump’s intervention, Ukraine’s top energy official has warned, as millions face a freezing winter without power.
DTEK’s Maxim Timchenko speaks out as Ukraine prepares to go further Russian drone and missile attacks on energy infrastructure and a day after Trump met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for the third time to end the nearly four-year war.
“Yesterday’s meeting gave us hope. But our task is not to live from hope to hope, but to continue doing what we have been doing for four years: responding to immediate challenges and fighting every day,” Timchenko told Fox News Digital.
U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky shake hands during a news conference following a meeting at the Trump Club at Mar-a-Lago December 28, 2025 in Palm Beach, Florida. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
“We are deeply grateful to President Trump for his leadership. We believe that he and his team are the only ones who can force Russia to negotiate and end the war, with the support of our partners in the European Union and other countries,” said the CEO of DTEK.
Founded by Ukrainian entrepreneur Rinat Akhmetov, DTEK is The largest private energy company in Ukraine and the backbone of the country’s electricity supply.
Before the full-scale invasion of Russia in 2022, the company operated eight thermal power plants. Three were subsequently occupied by Russian forces.
“Today we operate five power plantsand each of them has been attacked at least five times since the full-scale invasion,” Timchenko confirmed.
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A seller waits for customers at a store during a partial outage in Lviv on November 28, 2024, following Russian strikes on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. (Yuriy Dyachyshyn/AFP via Getty Images)
He described the damage as unprecedented. “The level of destruction is incomparable to any energy system in the world. Nothing like this has happened in modern history,” he said.
At one point, he said, almost all of DTEK’s production capacity was damaged or destroyed, with losses totaling hundreds of millions of dollars.
“And I can say that at one point, 90% of our production capacity was damaged or destroyed,” he explained.
“With this destruction, we lost hundreds of millions of dollars in direct damage, and I’m not even talking about the loss of income. So, just for 2025, our reconstruction budget was about $220 million, but if you take it from the beginning of the large-scale invasion, I say it’s hundreds, hundreds of millions of dollars,” Timchenko said.
Despite the destruction and losses suffered, his company restored power several times millions of Ukrainians.
“Since 2022, we have managed to reconnect more than 30 million homes and customers,” Timchenko said. “We fight and we are fast.”
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A drone hits a building in kyiv during the Russian attack on Ukraine, Saturday December 27, 2025. (Gleb Garanich/Reuters)
“In the last two years it has been extremely difficult. The attacks have become so intense and we live in crisis mode every day because our equipment is destroyed, power plants damaged, and the only thing we think about is how to restore power supply as quickly as possible,” Timchenko said.
He also added that recovery efforts include resuming gas drilling, continuing construction of Eastern Europe’s largest wind farm and building a major battery storage system with US company Fluence.
Furthermore, in Odessa, for example, around 600,000 people were affected by outages, with some neighborhoods left without electricity for several days.
But Russia’s latest large-scale strike arrived on December 26, when missiles and drones strike Kyiv and surrounding areas, cutting power to more than a million people in freezing weather.
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DTEK claims to have restored electricity to 30 million Ukrainian homes despite repeated Russian strikes on critical energy infrastructure. (Reuters)
“People have learned to live without necessities such as electricity,” Timchenko said.
“The temperature in kyiv was minus 10 degrees and because of this attack we couldn’t have water, we couldn’t heat ourselves and, of course, there is no electricity.
“They attacked us with missiles and ballistic calibers and Kalibr, then 500 drones and other types of missiles,” he added.
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Looking ahead, Timchenko emphasized Ukraine’s dependence on continued support.
“The energy system is at the heart of this fight. Modern life simply cannot exist without electricity. We need continued global support,” he added.
