Ukraine’s communications system has begun to suffer systemic outages, said Oleksandr Fediyenko, an MP from President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s Servant of the People party and head of the parliamentary subcommittee on cybersecurity and government communications. He argues that major mobile operators failed in previous years to invest in network resilience, a lapse that is now directly showing up in poorer service.
Fediyenko says operators should already be preparing for a much harsher scenario—a period in which electricity supplies could disappear altogether. Mobile networks, he argues, were the first to buckle, as expected. Talk of coverage “working perfectly” usually refers to the city centre and does not reflect the reality in smaller towns and villages. As an example, he points to the entrance to Brovary, where he says there was not a single bar of signal from any of the three operators.
“Mobile operators were the first to go down, just as had been forecast. And when people tell me how ‘great’ everything is working, I always ask them to look not at the capital’s centre, but at villages and small towns. For instance, yesterday at the entrance to Brovary there wasn’t a single bar of signal from any of the three operators. None. Power outages have become so long that, after the mobile networks, fixed-line operators that haven’t been modernised are starting to collapse too. Their networks are built on old designs, with batteries at every node, but batteries don’t last forever. They run flat. And then everything disappears. Operators should prepare for a scenario in which electricity stops being supplied altogether. Not for four hours. Not for three. Not even for an hour a day. It simply won’t be there. Kherson is the same example,” Fediyenko writes.
Residents of Izmail describe a similar picture. They say that the day before, the city had no electricity from 12:30PM to 12:00AM, and closer to 7:00PM mobile service deteriorated sharply and mobile internet stopped working: “In Izmail yesterday there was no electricity from 12:30PM to 12:00AM. Closer to 7:00PM, mobile service became completely unreliable. Mobile internet also did not work.”