Report of PTBN, Volume V (2025), Special Edition, titled “Russian Military Attacks on Ukraine and Wartime Operations Targeting Power Grid Infrastructure (2022–2024)”, authored by Dr. Michał Piekarski and Dr. Marcin Lipka, was prepared under the R-GRID project “AI Algorithms for Threat Prediction and Power Grid Protection” (No. G6249), implemented within the NATO Science for Peace and Security Programme.
The authors analyse Russia’s strategy of conducting systemic warfare, in which critical infrastructure — particularly energy infrastructure — becomes a fully fledged battlespace rather than merely an economic support base. They demonstrate the continuity of the Russian approach: from the hybrid takeover of Crimea in 2014 (paralysis of institutions, telecommunications and governance without mass physical destruction) to the open campaign of energy destruction conducted against Ukraine after 2022.
Since 2022, Russia has been executing an integrated “strategic operation for the destruction of critical targets”, based on the coordinated use of cruise and ballistic missiles, drones, cyberattacks, and information-psychological operations. The objective is not only to weaken Ukraine’s military potential, but above all to trigger cascading failures leading to a humanitarian crisis and the breakdown of state resilience — particularly in electricity generation, heat supply, water systems, and transport. The attacks are layered in nature: initial air-defence saturation with decoy drones, followed by cruise missile strikes, and finally high-speed ballistic missiles targeting key system nodes.
The report identifies four principal objectives of Russia’s energy campaign:
- Political-psychological — “energy terrorism” against the civilian population (the so-called weaponisation of winter),
- Economic — deindustrialisation of Ukraine and the forced dependence on external assistance,
- Military-operational — disruption of logistics (including rail and maritime transport), the defence industry, and command-and-control systems,
- Hybrid — integration of kinetic means with cyberattacks, information warfare, and psychological pressure.
At the same time, despite enormous losses (including mass shutdowns of thermal and hydroelectric power plants and strikes against high-voltage autotransformers), Ukraine has developed a practical school of infrastructure resilience. Three pillars proved decisive:
- Passive engineering protection (multi-layer shielding, transformer “sarcophagus”),
- Active defence (air and missile defence / electronic warfare systems),
- Structural transformation, primarily decentralisation through distributed generation and microgrids (“energy islands”).
The authors emphasise that none of these methods is effective in isolation — resilience emerges only from their synergy. Decentralisation shortens power restoration time and significantly complicates an adversary’s ability to paralyse the system completely.
In the prognostic section (2025–2030), the report warns that Ukraine’s wartime experience constitutes a testing ground for future operations against third states, including NATO members. Anticipated scenarios include synchronised cyber-kinetic attacks resulting in blackouts, sabotage of subsea infrastructure (cables, pipelines, LNG), and kinetic escalation at sea. Particularly alarming is the “grey zone” — actions below the threshold of formal war, with difficult attribution, capable of paralysing alliance decision-making processes.
The authors formulate concrete recommendations for NATO states: implementation of the “resilience by design” principle (resilience embedded at the design stage), strengthening legal frameworks against sabotage and shadow fleets, integration of sensor data (including private-sector sources) to ensure full maritime situational awareness, development of counter-drone and subsea warfare capabilities, and intensification of counterintelligence efforts within critical infrastructure sectors.
The Report’s conclusion is unequivocal: the war in Ukraine has permanently transformed European thinking about energy security. Energy infrastructure is no longer solely an economic asset — it has become a domain of warfare. For NATO, security of energy supply must be treated on par with territorial defence, and the real test of collective defence effectiveness in the coming decade will be the ability to deter, detect, and respond decisively to hybrid attacks in this sphere.
