Ahead of his talk at South East Europe Green EPC in Bucharest, Oleksandr Lypskyi the head of the SME Support Committee at the Kyiv Chamber of Commerce and Industry explains why Ukraine’s energy system is now a regional security issue — and where exactly the biggest business opportunities for Romania lie
Ukraine is no longer restoring its old energy system — it is building a new one: distributed, flexible, and integrated with the EU. For Romania, that is both a warning sign and one of the biggest investment opportunities of the decade — from locomotive repair to logistics through Constanța. On October 8 in Bucharest, I will explain why these two messages — security and business — can no longer be treated separately.
When a €50,000 drone hit takes out a €30–50 million substation
In 2023, I watched with my own eyes as an ordinary “Shahed” drone costing under €50,000 struck the main transformer of a large distribution substation. The fire could not be brought under control for more than 12 hours — the oil and other flammable materials inside turned a single hit into the destruction of equipment worth tens of millions of euros. The threat has only grown more serious since: “Geran-4” and “Geran-5” russian jet-powered drones are guided by an operator in real time, strike targets precisely at long range, and are genuinely hard to intercept because of their speed and maneuverability. That is the new math of this war: the enemy has learned to destroy infrastructure at a cost hundreds of times lower than what it takes to rebuild it.
The core message for Romanian business
Energy can no longer be treated as just another sector of the economy — it is a matter of national security, and not only Ukraine’s. Hybrid attacks on energy facilities were recorded in Germany several times this year, and russian attack drones have repeatedly crossed into Moldovan and Romanian airspace. Until recently, Romanian business thought mainly about how to get into Ukraine’s reconstruction market. Today it needs to think just as seriously about defending its own energy system, about stable interconnection, and about emergency balancing support from its neighbors — because hybrid threats no longer respect clear borders: the enemy is constantly testing the limits of what it can get away with and probing for weak points in the infrastructure of neighboring countries.
“A drone costing less than €50,000 can destroy a substation worth €30–50 million. No other modern energy system in the world has endured destruction on this scale — or had to adapt this fast.”
The state of the Ukraine’s energy system ahead of winter
The numbers speak for themselves. In the past heating season, russia damaged 1,613 energy facilities and knocked out 9 GW of generating capacity — enough to power four EU countries. As of August 21, 2026, 4.8 GW had already been repaired, with roughly 4 GW more under repair; by year-end, Ukraine plans to restore and build more than 10 GW, bringing available generation to 21.4 GW. But this is not reconstruction in the usual sense — it is emergency patching under constant fire and airborne threat, carried out in parallel with the build-out of a fundamentally new, distributed grid architecture: hundreds of small facilities instead of a handful of large targets.
Where Romanian business can win today
The sharpest demand — and the one best backed by real capital — is for distributed-generation equipment: gas-piston and gas-turbine units, modular solar plants, industrial energy storage systems. As of April 2026, Ukrainian banks had already financed 1.517 GW of such projects worth UAH 41.5 billion — that is not a statement of intent, it is a proven market.
The second area is rail, where the need is practically unlimited. Since the start of the war, russia has damaged or destroyed more than 500 Ukrainian locomotives, with more than half of that total lost in 2026 alone, using newly deployed jet-powered drones; Ukrainian Railways is now losing up to 40 units of rolling stock every month. Romanian manufacturers and service companies should look closely at supplying and repairing locomotives compatible with the 1,520 mm gauge, along with related rolling stock — an issue Ukraine is already raising formally with its partners.
Transit through Constanța: a window that must not be missed
With Black Sea ports under blockade, Constanța has already become a key alternative hub for Ukrainian agricultural exports: by November, the shortfall in grain-storage capacity could reach 8–11 million tonnes. In parallel, the Suceava–Siret expressway (an extension of the A7 motorway) is under construction, with Romania financing 15 km of road on Ukrainian territory for the first time in history, while the terminal at the Porubne–Siret border crossing has already been modernized with EU funding. Investment in Constanța’s transshipment capacity, in dredging, and in the safety of shipping along the Sulina Canal and the Danube ports could turn a temporary wartime workaround into a permanent logistics advantage for Romania — one that will keep paying off long after the war ends.
Capital is already moving both ways
Ukrainian business is already choosing Romania systematically. Interpipe and Metinvest have acquired former ArcelorMittal plants in Romania, DTEK is building a 299 MW renewable-energy portfolio anchored by the largest physical PPA in the country’s history, and pharmaceutical producer Biopharma is building an €85 million plant in Arad. Ukrainian retailers and logistics operators — Nova Post, Aurora Multimarket, Kormotech — are expanding their networks in Romania, looking above all for EU market access and warehouse capacity outside the range of missile strikes, for both business and households. There is reverse technology transfer too: Ukraine’s Edrone, together with Romania’s OVES Enterprise, is localizing combat-drone production in Cluj-Napoca — a clear example of how Ukraine’s battlefield experience is becoming an export product for the region’s defense industry.
How investor risk is being reduced
The main barrier to foreign capital is war risk, and the state acknowledges it. The government is preparing a $1 billion business-insurance mechanism covering 40–50% of losses from attacks; the EBRD has already launched its own guarantee instrument, the Ukraine Recovery and Reconstruction Guarantee Facility, to restart the war-risk insurance market, bringing its overall support portfolio for Ukraine to nearly €10 billion. On top of that, the US DFC finances projects in energy, agriculture, and IT, guarantees are available from MIGA and export agencies such as Poland’s KUKE, and Ukraine runs its own subsidized “5-7-9%” lending program. None of this removes the risk entirely, but for the first time it gives investors a transparent, structured set of tools for managing it.
See you soon in Bucharest
On October 8, at South East Europe Green EPC, I will travel to Bucharest directly from a city that lives under daily attacks from the air, and I will speak plainly and openly about exactly this: why resilience and business opportunity in Ukraine’s energy sector have become one and the same equation. Ukraine has now lived in this reality for five years — a reality Europe has yet to learn how to manage, and one that is genuinely hard to grasp without having experienced it firsthand. We are ready to share what we have learned — and we are sincerely grateful to Romania for consistently standing by Ukraine’s side.
