00:00Mr. Timchenko, thanks for joining us this morning. I'll beat under very tragic circumstances with
00:05you losing 12 mine workers, from what we understand, in an attack on a bus yesterday.
00:11First of all, can you give us an update on what we know? Last time I spoke to your team yesterday,
00:14you were still gathering information. Thank you, Oliver. Yes, yesterday was one of the darkest days
00:22in the history of our company. You know that we had this war since 2014. As an energy company,
00:27more than 10 years, we were on this energy front. And yesterday, it was the single, the largest single
00:34loss of our people. And coal miners just going home after the shift to their families,
00:43their houses, they were targetedly attacked by Russians, by two drones, which brought to this
00:50disaster and loss of lives of our people. So unfortunately, this is what...
00:57Russians do with civilians.
01:02Yeah. And your workers are often in the line of fire, you know, obviously, fixing substations,
01:09connection points, power plants that are often the subject of Russian attack. Was it... Are you able
01:15to determine whether this was part of a more broader attack on the energy infrastructure in DTEK? Or was
01:20this a one-off within the region? What can you tell us about other sort of damage that has been done?
01:24No. Since October last year, we experienced daily attacks on our energy infrastructure. Either it's on
01:33front line, our grid, transformers, power lines, or our power stations, or our coal mines.
01:41But the cynicism of these attacks is that the same, the same place as they attacked our, our people
01:49yesterday. Only after six hours, they attack our coal mine and facility of the coal mine, just 20 meters
01:57from, from this, from this traditional place. And this is basically the face of Russians. There is no
02:02limits for them. They attack civilians. They destroy, destroyed life of people.
02:07And when we last spoke about six weeks ago on December 23rd, you said this is going to be the
02:14hardest winter Ukraine has had yet amid several very difficult winters. And just to give people
02:19some context in terms of what that means, obviously, tens of thousands of people periodically have
02:23been without electricity, without heat. And I just looked it up this morning that in temperatures in
02:28Kyiv today are a high of minus 14 degrees with a low of 23 degrees Celsius. So in Fahrenheit, that's six
02:35degrees Fahrenheit for the high and low of negative nine degrees Fahrenheit. Can you give us a broader
02:40update of the energy situation currently in Ukraine? Last time we spoke, you said that since September, about
02:45more than 50 percent of energy generation had been knocked out or damaged in some way. Is that figure higher
02:51today or lower? Do you manage to restore some of it? Unfortunately, unfortunately, this figure is higher. And
02:56that's the primary reason why our people stand without electricity for more than 20 hours every day. So we have
03:03apartment blocks without heating for weeks. And for the average temperature in apartments is plus six plates, eight
03:13degrees. So basically, Russians bring us to unlivable conditions, millions of our people. Energy
03:20fire is extremely important for us is to have some break to recover and to ease the situation. But
03:26unfortunately, with such weather conditions, it's extremely difficult to do. I've just visited our
03:32power stations that you can imagine in our machine building, the temperature is minus 10. So under these
03:38extreme conditions, it's very hard for us to recover power stations, to recover our turbines, to relaunch
03:45our facilities.
03:50And I wanted to ask you about some of the other conditions. Obviously, the military of the war is
03:54going to be one of the main factors influencing the energy situation. But there's also been reports over
03:59the weekend of large power blackouts due, I think, well, you'll know better than me, and we'd like to
04:03know, and I got an idea, due to ice and the weather conditions, what can you tell us about those blackouts?
04:08And is there a chance that it will happen again? Do you have your sort of arms around the issue? Can
04:12you prevent it from happening again?
04:14Yeah, this kind of blackouts eventually is the result of rushing and destruction of our equipment.
04:22After five, six, seven attacks of each power station, each power unit, of course, the state of this
04:30equipment is very low, very bad. That's why weather conditions or any other reasons can bring us to
04:37such blackouts or such consequences as we observed just two days ago. We are in a difficult situation.
04:46We are at survival mode now.
04:50And then we also heard from President Trump saying that he made a plea to President Vladimir Putin,
04:55saying that there should not be any attacks on Kyiv, potentially not any attacks on energy
05:00infrastructure for the next few days, for the next week. Has there been any sign,
05:04as you are the operator of one of the largest sort of power companies within Ukraine, that there has
05:09been some kind of energy ceasefire in the last few days? And how long do you expect it to last if there
05:13has been evidence of that? First of all, we are very much grateful to the President Trump for this
05:19initiative. One year ago, he agreed already on energy ceasefire and help us to recover important parts of
05:27our equipment, be more prepared for the for the for the current winter. And now, yes, at large extent,
05:35we see that it's still honored for the last two, three, three days, there is no large attacks on our
05:42infrastructure. And but matter, it's it's matter not days, but weeks, which we need to to recover
05:49what was destroyed recently. So that's why for us extremely important that we do for long.
05:57And do you have any idea how much longer you expect it to last?
06:02It's we hope that our our our team and our people can can negotiate for longer time. So it's it's
06:09difficult for me to make any any predictions.
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