Russia's defense ministry posted photographs of attack drones in flight on its Telegram channel, captioned "like snow on your head," and told Ukrainians that "in winter, you'll get a freeze." The ministry attached the threat to its own earlier claim of strikes on Ukrainian port infrastructure and vessels.

The post puts in writing what Russia has done to Ukrainian civilians through every winter of the full-scale war: strike the power and heating grid to leave homes cold and dark. What is new is not the tactic but the candor — a ministry that usually insists it hits only military targets openly advertising the coming assault on the systems that keep civilians warm. And the taunt lands as Ukraine heads into the season more exposed than at any point in the war: President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told CNN this week that the country holds about 1% of the Patriot interceptors it needs to get through winter.

The winter campaign Russia is advertising

Since late 2022, Russia has systematically struck Ukraine's electricity, gas, and heating infrastructure, causing rolling blackouts and cutting heat and water during freezing weather. Ukrainian officials have repeatedly called the campaign "energy terrorism," and grid operators say the strikes have shifted toward knocking out entire energy districts rather than staging single mass barrages. This summer Russia widened the target set again: on 13 August a Russian drone set port infrastructure alight in Odesa Oblast and damaged a civilian vessel at a Mykolaiv port, the national rail operator and regional officials reported — the same kind of strike the ministry's post was boasting about.

Ukraine enters winter short of the weapon that stops ballistic missiles

The threat is heavier because Ukraine cannot reliably stop the missiles that would carry it out. Zelenskyy told CNN that selling Kyiv 5% of current US Patriot stocks would carry it through winter and 10% would let it "destroy all the Russians' ballistic missiles" — but that he holds 1%. On 5 August, Russia fired 28 ballistic and anti-ship missiles at Kyiv and Ukraine intercepted none, killing 17 people. July was the deadliest month for Ukrainian civilians since April 2022, according to the UN.

Europe is scrambling to add generation before the cold sets in. Finland said on 13 August it would fund a €28.5 million ($33.2 million) power plant project for Ukraine, one of several efforts to keep the lights on when the strikes resume. Ukrainian officials have warned that the coming winter could be more difficult than any before it.

A Russian drone clipped one of Serhii’s wind turbines; his crew repaired the blade and carried on. He runs an oil-pressing plant in southern Ukraine, where the grid gives him about two hours of power and then 10 without. The turbine is one of six he has bought—Dutch machines, pulled from wind farms in the Netherlands for being too small, and shipped east.

In the Netherlands, a turbine like that is barely worth the paperwork. Over a blacked-out Ukrainian factory, it is worth shipping across a continent. That gap is turning into a market.

The market has formed largely on its own. Buyers like Serhii got their turbines through what Bert van der Lingen, vice-chairman of the Dutch wind association NedZero, calls “free market conditions”—private deals, one at a time—ahead of the Dutch government program meant to organize the trade, “Renewed Energy for Ukraine,” which began only in December 2025 and is still in start-up.

NedZero wrote to Euromaidan Press to correct an earlier report, drawn from the Dutch daily De Telegraaf, that called the turbines worn out. They are not.

A machine comes down in the Netherlands only because a newer model on the same spot would earn five or six times as much. The old one still works. Stripped, inspected, and fitted with new bearings and a rebuilt gearbox, it has “fifteen to twenty years of technical life remaining.”

“This is a story we want to see grow,” van der Lingen added, “and getting the baseline right helps that.”

Why blacked-out Ukraine wants Europe’s spares

Ukraine is one buyer in a market that predates the war. “There is an active world market for refurbished wind turbines,” van der Lingen notes: Dutch machines freed up by repowering already spin from Poland and the Baltics to Jordan, Kenya, and Chile, sold with maintenance records and spare parts to match.

The supply is thin, and slow to move. By NedZero’s own survey, 486 Dutch turbines are due to come down over the decade to 2035—a floor, it says, since not every producer answered—and only a portion will be shipped anywhere, fewer still to Ukraine. A market like this gets built one deal at a time.

What makes Ukraine the eager buyer is what Russia has done to its lights. Four winters of strikes have destroyed or damaged more than 80% of the country’s power-generating capacity, by the energy ministry’s own count—its big Soviet-built plants are so few and so concentrated that one missile can darken a whole region.

Kyiv’s answer is to scatter generation so widely that no single strike can repeat the trick, an approach the ministry describes as “energy cells.” One refurbished turbine beside one factory is that doctrine at its smallest scale.

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Small, slow, and off the books

Money is the bottleneck. Development banks lend in amounts far too large for a handful of turbines—support from the big institutions starts at around €10 million ($11 million)—so small orders have to be bundled into projects large enough to finance. How many turbines reach Ukraine, the association says, depends on whether that bundling comes together.

Then there is the wiring. A turbine only makes power when the wind blows, not when the factory needs it. And most are built to shut down automatically when the grid fails, so a blackout silences them too—exactly when the factory needs them most—unless they are rewired, with batteries, to run on their own. That is what the microgrids are for.

NedZero cannot say how many Dutch turbines are already working in Ukraine. It has no consolidated count of what its country’s firms have delivered, nor of the megawatts they have added to the grid, and offers only to go and count them. What is coming free is on the books; what is already turning above a Ukrainian factory, holding its lights while the grid is dark, is not.