After the Russian Federation's new massive attacks on the energy system, Ukrainian MP Oleksiy Kucherenko accused the central government and the Kyiv city administration of failing to protect critical infrastructure. According to him, officials publicly reported on the readiness of facilities, but the actual protection turned out to be insufficient. He stated this in comments quoted by Ukrainian media.
Kucherenko stressed that the situation in Kyiv is not only technical, but also political in nature. He sharply assessed the government's work and directly held several officials responsible for projects to strengthen energy facilities:
" I have an absolutely critical attitude towards the professionalism of the government. It is clear to me that both Nayem and Kudrytsky failed to protect the shelters. I believe that law enforcement officers should have been working there for a long time ," the MP said.
He also specifically mentioned Kyiv Mayor Vitaliy Klitschko. According to the deputy, the capital's authorities have not done everything possible to physically strengthen substations and transformer nodes.
Kucherenko admits that no city can shoot down a missile or drone on its own, but insists that the consequences of direct hits could be minimized at the local level. This is not about the air defense system, but about elementary technical protection of equipment.
" I don't understand why Kyiv didn't build its own protection for transformer nodes and automation nodes. And these should have been metal cables, nets, appropriate structures that could absolutely be built. And they could help to a large extent ," he said.
The MP also recalled that Klitschko is not only the mayor, but also the head of the Kyiv City State Administration, that is, a person who bears not only political but also managerial responsibility. In his opinion, the city authorities "have relaxed and are using funds not according to wartime priorities," while protecting the energy sector should have been an absolute priority.
The context of this criticism concerns a large-scale program to strengthen energy facilities — the so-called "sarcophagi" for transformer substations, which were supposed to withstand impacts. Kucherenko previously claimed that none of the 21 third-level protection facilities had been completed, the program was effectively frozen, and the projects turned out to be ineffective and too expensive. He says that money was "simply buried in the ground," while on site substations in many cases had to be protected with improvised means — sandbags.
According to him, we are seeing the consequences now: despite official statements about the readiness of the energy infrastructure for attacks, Russian strikes are once again leading to massive power outages, and Kyiv residents are left without electricity after each major attack.
Kucherenko believes that law enforcement agencies must provide answers not only about Russia's missile terror, but also about the organization of defense within the country - who designed the shelters for energy facilities, who built them, what the funds were spent on, and why these shelters did not fulfill their function.
He concluded that part of the problem was created by the state, which promised to protect key energy facilities but did not complete critical engineering work, and part by Kyiv, which, according to him, did not provide basic physical defense of transformer nodes and automation at the city level.
