Volodymyr Kudrytskyi served as chairman of Ukrenergo, Ukraine’s national electricity transmission system operator, from 2020 to 2024. He disconnected Ukraine from the Russian-Belarusian power grid mere hours before the full-scale invasion. He achieved emergency synchronization with the European grid in just three weeks—a process that typically takes years.
He now faces fraud charges over a 2018 fence project, where court documents show the state suffered no losses—charges that anti-corruption activists call political persecution following his public criticism of the now-former Energy Minister, Herman Halushchenko.
In November 2025, Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau exposed a $100 million kickback scheme at Energoatom, the state nuclear operator. The scandal implicated businessman Tymur Mindich, a longtime associate of President Zelenskyy, and led to the dismissal of two cabinet ministers.
Kudrytskyi offers his assessment of what the investigation revealed about Ukraine’s energy sector governance—and why he sees the scandal as Ukraine’s best chance for genuine reform.
This corruption scandal seems to reach the highest levels. What’s your assessment?
It seems the scheme was covered by the highest political leadership. Such a scheme could not go unnoticed by many law enforcement authorities for many years. Presidential power was used by his friend and, allegedly, the head of his office, along with some ministers and a vice prime minister, to steal a lot of money, not only from Energoatom but from many other companies.
We tried to pull Energoatom and uncovered a much bigger plot.
Energoatom was just one element of this puzzle—not the only one, and not the biggest. We’re talking about billions in potential embezzlement. NABU recorded around $100 million in turnover, but I’m sure this is a tiny part of what was happening.
You see a silver lining in this?
I do. When it was covered up, we had no chance to heal. Now we have a real chance for change.
We demonstrated to the world not only that we have corrupt officials, but also that we have a huge demand from society for justice. Ukrainian society, with its zero tolerance for corruption, is European. The government doesn’t fit the expectations of such a society so far.
We have a society of the 21st century, but the government is stuck in the 20th century.
We cannot change the president and parliament right now, but they can change their behavior in response to pressure from society and Western partners.
These are very unpleasant events. But surgery is always unpleasant—yet in the majority of cases, it’s for the good. I would compare this to a complicated surgery on the governance system of Ukraine.
And it’s not hard to stop stealing during the war. I would not say this is a very difficult reform. You don’t need to wait until the end of the war to stop doing that.
In the Mindich recordings, someone called protecting energy infrastructure “a waste of money.” What’s the consequence of decision-makers thinking that way?
The result is you have no shelters—and this is what we see in many energy companies.
Ukrenergo has shelters for transformers at substations. But other infrastructure—such as Energoatom, power plant operators, distribution grids, and gas infrastructure—is not effectively sheltered. I heard today that some gas transit and storage infrastructure was damaged by kamikaze drones. That means they’re not sheltered.
If all institutions had been properly coordinated by the Energy Ministry in 2023, and if they had started sheltering then, we would have the country’s gas and energy infrastructure much more protected by now.
We would have less damage. It doesn’t mean we would have no problems when Russia spends thousands of missiles and tens of thousands of Shaheds. But we would have fewer problems.
How much money are we talking about?
Ukrenergo spent $200–300 million on all our shelters. Energoatom’s prices were many times higher, with an alleged 10% kickback. If those $100 million had been used for building 20 or 30 shelters for critical objects, that would probably cover most critical power plants.
I talked to an operator of big power plants in the east. His power plant was hit by 16 kamikaze drones. All those drones destroyed transformers under open air, not sheltered, because nobody allocated resources. The Russians just cut off the machine hall—which is otherwise intact—from the grid. If they had shelters, we would have much more generation capacity in the eastern region today.
How did this happen? Ukraine has OECD governance principles, supervisory boards...
The problem was that Energy Minister Halushchenko and his team managed to appoint their nominees to a majority of institutions within the energy sector. They created a closed system within which they were able to produce kickbacks.
OECD principles were implemented for window-dressing purposes.
Energoatom had a supervisory board, but it was a joke—not properly formed, and even the independent members were not supervising management. These mechanisms—supervisory boards, independent nomination committees—were almost always obeying commands from the presidential office.
The same with law enforcement. We have two independent institutions, the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO), as well as the Office of the Prosecutor General, the State Bureau of Investigations, and the national police.
They could close their eyes to wrongdoing for years.
Following commands, they could put innocent people in jail, like NABU detective Ruslan Mahamedrasulov, who was sentenced for five months for a fabricated crime [Mahamedrasulov was released only on 3 December 2025.—Euromaidan Press]
That’s why this system was doomed to be corrupt and inefficient. You cannot have efficient protection of facilities within an inefficient system with broken internal rules.
Is it physically possible to protect large power plants?
Let’s define protection. We’re not saying concrete shelters mean you feel nothing when 30 missiles and 500 drones hit you.
The formula of this energy war is: you must recover more quickly than your adversary is able to destroy.
You decrease the success rate of Russian strikes by combining air defense with shelters, creating an emergency stock of equipment, and training personnel to recover quickly. You increase your speed of recovery and decrease their speed of destruction.
You can shelter big power plants—not the machine hall, but you can shelter the autotransformer. Two missiles would still damage the machine hall, but 50 Shahed drones would not be able to destroy the autotransformers. Therefore, you recover quicker.
What about decentralizing the system?
When we talk about decentralization, we mean energy generation. Not the grid, because the grid is already decentralized in a sense.
Yes, substations power hundreds of thousands of people. But you cannot build 10 smaller substations instead of one large one—it’s technically impossible. Ukrenergo substations are large because they operate at very high voltage to transport energy from power plants 200-300 kilometers away. You cannot decentralize that.
What you can decentralize are the 15 large power plants, which are primary targets for Russian missiles.
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Decentralizing means building thousands of smaller, containerized power plants instead. You make Russians helpless because they cannot even find where those thousands of plants are. When you lose 10, it takes months to replenish, and nobody feels power cuts because those 10 are 0.01% of total capacity.
You disconnected from Russia mere hours before the invasion and connected to Europe in three weeks. How critical has that been?
Without the European connection, we would simply collapse. The energy system would collapse—and after that, the front line would collapse too, because there would be no logistics in place. The country would be paralyzed.
You can imagine a bicycle. Managing a power system is like riding a bicycle—you need to keep balance every second. Europe makes our bicycle four-wheeled.
When Ukraine has disruptions—for example, after a missile hits a power plant—if we were not connected to Europe, we would probably collapse. Because we are connected, some oscillations that could be deadly for us standing alone are much softer. Europe softens the disruption during those first critical milliseconds.
Europe also supplies Ukraine with up to 20% of its power consumption. When you have a 20% deficit, that means two to three groups of disconnected customers out of six. Europe decreases the number of disconnected groups by two. That’s absolutely critical.
During the partial blackout in November 2022, we powered up our system from Europe.
Had we still been connected to Russia, they could shut down our power system without any missiles—their control center operated the whole area from the Urals to Ukraine. They would just switch us off from their control room.
What else explains Ukraine’s resilience?
First, we have in-house employees trained to recover. European operators typically have 300-500 employees, mostly in administrative roles—they outsource everything. Ukrenergo had 8,000 people, 6,000 working in the field.
Second, Ukrainian infrastructure has a huge safety buffer from Soviet times. Ukraine consumed 300 billion kilowatt-hours in 1991. It consumes less than 100 now. The grid has only increased since then.
So we have a threefold safety buffer of grid capacity.
When the adversary destroys one autotransformer, you can allow him to destroy another before you feel consequences. In Europe, the safety buffer is around 20%. In Ukraine, it’s 200-300%.
It was bad because these Soviet factories produced non-competitive goods nobody wanted—a waste of energy. But it’s a positive externality of an otherwise inefficient economy.
How resilient is Ukraine entering another war winter?
We survived many winters already—2022-23, then the next, then another. Nothing catastrophic will happen. The system will not collapse for two weeks.
It will be a hard winter with very uncomfortable power cuts at times. When it gets colder, power cuts will be nastier. When it gets warmer, and after a week or two after the last attack, recovery takes hold.
If you’re in Ukraine, you know all customers are divided into six groups. The severity of the deficit is characterized by how many groups are disconnected simultaneously. One group is more or less soft. Two is moderate. Three is bad. Four is nasty.
The situation will fluctuate following weather patterns and the recovery-destruction balance.
But we will survive the winter. I don’t think there will be a national blackout. And I don’t think this winter will be much harder than the 2022-23 winter.
The most complicated winter we have already passed—the first winter of the full-scale war. This doesn’t mean a pleasant journey. It just means nothing particularly new. Two groups disconnected sometimes, four sometimes, one sometimes, none, and in this way, we will pass.
When we’re constantly in emergency mode, is reform even possible?
This is the only possible solution—to do reforms, especially during war. You cannot find a better time.
After the full-scale war started, we connected to Europe. We started deploying decentralized generation. We replaced Ukrenergo’s almost entire autotransformer fleet, much quicker than during Soviet times.
War is a time for drastic change. Look at the battlefield—when would you expect revolution in military tactics if not during war?
When you hear people saying we need to wait for reforms until after the war, these people either don’t understand what they’re talking about or they’re trying to justify corruption.
The challenges the sector faces are such that you need reforms not to make it better, but to survive. Your motivation has to be much higher than otherwise.
It’s all about corruption and transparency, two opposing concepts. You need to run toward the bright side much quicker during war.
No excuses.
