Ukraine’s legacy grid and wartime agility could help answer Europe’s energy problem
Lana Zerkal is a member of the Ukraine Facility Platform’s Coordination Council, and Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary. This essay is part of the 2026 Global Energy Agenda.
Europe’s electricity grids were not built for the demands now being placed on them. The proliferation of large-scale data centers has fundamentally altered the continent’s energy arithmetic. This energy demand growth has exposed a structural power deficit that European policymakers have yet to adequately address. The bloc’s planning and permitting system has been widely criticized as fragmented and ill-suited to the pace now required. Meanwhile, Ukraine, whose infrastructure was designed expressly to export energy, has the potential to more quickly close part of Europe’s energy gap—despite four years of systematic attacks on its grid by Russia.
Aiding this position, Ukraine’s parliament passed a legislative package in the spring to integrate Ukraine’s spot electricity market with Europe’s and replace a system driven by favors with one governed by transparent rules. Not only will the transformation bolster European supply security, but it also marks a significant pivot as Ukraine’s Soviet-built energy infrastructure will soon be poised to serve as a counterweight to Russian influence rather than a pillar of it.
The architecture of control
Ukraine’s strong position as a potential supplier of European energy is rooted in its history and geography. More than half a century ago, Ukraine was the westernmost Soviet republic and was assigned the role of energy hub. Three nuclear stations in the west and southwest were designed to push electricity westward to its European neighbors. A sprawling, high-capacity transmission network was built to match. By 1990, Soviet Ukraine was generating around 300 billion kilowatt-hours annually—among the largest outputs in Europe—and supplying the bulk of the Soviet Union’s electricity exports to the continent.
After the Soviet collapse, Ukraine’s grid remained synchronized with Russia and Belarus for three decades. But Russia’s occupation of Crimea and eastern Ukraine in 2014 upended the status quo. By 2017, Ukraine had begun formal preparations to disconnect from the old Soviet grid and synchronize with the European network.
On the morning of February 24, 2022, hours before the first missiles fell, Ukraine disconnected from the Russian power grid. Three weeks later, it synchronized with the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity, known as ENTSO-E. The move became one of the key factors enabling Ukraine’s energy sector to hold under sustained Russian attack—through electricity imports from Europe and technical support from EU member states.
Russia’s war scattered Ukraine’s power generation capacity with a thoroughness that was anything but accidental. It went after major power plants to try to weaken Ukraine’s ability and will to fight back. Instead, Ukraine responded with systematic physical decentralization of energy: replacing lost generation capacities with small, dispersed units that are harder to find, harder to hit, and more compatible with the decentralized logic of the European grid as Ukraine integrates into ENTSO-E.
Wartime strategy, however, has its limits: distributed micro generation cannot restore the volumes Ukraine has lost. The underlying grid infrastructure, however, remains, creating a long-term opening to re-tap its potential to not only meet domestic demand but also support the energy needs of its European neighbors.
A new answer of new European demand
Europe’s ability to meet its own energy demand from within will not come quickly. AI infrastructure alone is pushing electricity demand to levels that legacy grids in Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and Dublin were never built to handle, with connection queues stretching up to thirteen years in some markets. Central and Eastern European countries will require stronger supply security and additional generating capacity over the next decade. Even before the Strait of Hormuz closure triggered an energy crisis, Poland alone was already estimating a need for nearly 15 percent more new generation capacity.
That demand is where Ukraine’s advantage sits. The same infrastructure Soviet planners built to pull Europe eastward has already been carrying electricity in both directions: Ukraine exports power when it has a surplus and imports when it needs to. But to become a reliable partner in European energy security, what Ukraine needs more of is large-scale generation.
The financial architecture to fill the power-generation gap is already taking shape. The Ukraine Facility—the EU’s principal instrument for financing Ukraine’s recovery—covers public and private projects alike and is already funding decentralized energy initiatives on the ground in partnership with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Additionally, the Ukraine-US Resource and Defense Framework Agreement signed in 2025 established a US-Ukraine Reconstruction Investment Fund and extended political risk and war-risk coverage to American businesses entering critical sectors of the Ukrainian economy, including energy. The agreement creates a channel for companies that have already signed memoranda with Energoatom, Ukraine’s national nuclear power company, as well as for the broader field of US firms and technologies looking for a market where the investment case holds.
For new generation capacity, Ukraine can accommodate a broad technology mix: gas and biomass cogeneration, wind, solar, and gas peaker plants. Each of these fits within a grid built to carry significantly more than domestic demand has ever required. After market integration, whatever Ukraine generates beyond its own consumption level can flow into the continental market. The April 2026 law that connects Ukraine’s spot electricity market to Europe’s laid a path to enable this flow, and within two to three years, Ukraine will be part of a pan-European market. The country has the potential to add between 5 and 10 percent in additional volumes to the shared European market, depending on the pace of recovery and new generation coming online.
Large-scale generation in Ukraine remains, for now, a matter of investment pipelines and planning horizons. What has already been built—forced into existence by four years of Russian attacks—makes a separate and more immediate case for a system ready for the energy challenge of the future. Thousands of small, distributed units feeding independent load pockets have produced a grid architecture that happens to be exactly what modern AI infrastructure would have specified from scratch. Meanwhile, Europe’s centralized hubs strain at nodes never designed to carry the concentrated loads they’re managing today. What emerged from necessity makes Ukraine’s system inherently resilient—and keeps it free of the connection backlogs that now define European capacity markets.
This may one day make for a triumphant tale in economic history: an energy system that rose from Soviet ash, was half-destroyed by Russia, and, by rebuilding capacity and integrating with Europe’s grid, made the clearest possible argument against Russian control of the continent’s energy future.
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