Ukraine’s Repair Crews Dodge Bullets And Splice Cable To Keep The Country Online

The closest engineering crew consisted of a four-man field unit and a dispatcher based on the other side of the Dnieper River from Bespalova. The men, all but one in their 50s, operated out of a large building with carefully tended potted plants inside and a wooden shelter out front where they played dominoes and smoked. They’d been working just about every day since the Russian invasion began almost four weeks earlier, but Pushcha-Vodytsya was closer to the front than anywhere they’d yet been, 3 miles from the Russian-occupied suburbs of Bucha and Irpin, and the fighting was heavy. They’d need a military escort.

Bespalova called Serhiy Hrebin, one of the crew’s engineers, and explained the situation. She could hear their driver, Serhiy Rumak, grumbling in the background that it was far too dangerous a job. Bespalova asked Hrebin to pass Rumak the phone and spelled out how important it was. “OK,” Rumak relented. “But what are you going to tell my wife?”

Around 11 a.m. the field unit packed into their white Renault Dokker van and drove out through deserted streets and looming modernist tower blocks. It was a familiar route; they’d all strolled beneath the pines and oaks of Pushcha-Vodytsya’s woodland paths and fished in its glassy lakes. Now the way was partially blocked by barbed wire and military checkpoints. On the highway north they slowed at a sprawling defensive complex of zigzagging trenches reinforced with concrete emplacements to pick up the soldiers who would escort them. The roads were scarred by explosions and flanked by the charred remains of armored vehicles, and the booms of artillery and rattle of small arms were growing louder.

They kept moving past a large wooden Orthodox cross and into a village that was nothing like the idyll they remembered. Houses and public buildings had been ripped apart or burned to blackened skeletons, and there was no sign of residents. Rumak pulled up by a brick house behind a red gate, and the men discovered that the outbuilding holding the network node they’d come to repair was now rubble. Shells and rockets were splitting the air directly over their heads by then, and they could hear gunfire close by in the forest, with no way of telling whether it was Ukrainian or Russian. If something landed nearby, the troops escorting them said, they should lie flat on their faces, as quickly as they could.

The crew worked on fear and adrenaline. Whatever had hit the outbuilding had left nothing of the node to repair, but they were able to use a length of cabling to splice sheared connections and bypass it—not a textbook fix, but good enough. Oleksander Lobaiev, a sturdy cable man with a neat mustache and half-frame glasses, remembered afterward that his hands were shaking too badly to even hold a screw between his thumb and forefinger. Bespalova monitored the crew’s progress via cellphone, hoping desperately to hear they were safe. Even from her office she could hear how heavy the shelling was.

Twenty minutes later, Rumak was driving fast, back the way they’d come. The team arrived at their base to find another job waiting for them and no time to rest. Before they left again, they sparked up cigarettes, even those who didn’t usually indulge.

“Sometimes if you’re stressed, you need to bum a smoke,” Lobaiev said when we met in July, laughing and miming a deep, grateful drag.

It was one of the worst days the crew could remember, even as this kind of work was quickly becoming ordinary for the men and women of Ukraine’s telecom industry. At the outset of the conflict, Ukrtelecom, once a state monopoly and still a dominant fixed-line and internet operator, was serving hundreds of thousands of civilian customers, as well as the armed forces, state bodies and financial institutions. Since then, the company and providers such as Vodafone Group Plc and Kyivstar, the two largest mobile operators, have facilitated everything from the military’s defensive actions to broadcasting President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s speeches to a rattled populace and his pleas to foreign leaders for weapons. They’ve issued text alerts warning of Russian saboteurs and informed communities of curfews and evacuation orders. They’ve allowed ordinary Ukrainians to check in with family, to follow the news and, in some cases, to report Russian troop movements and positions so the invaders could be targeted by drone, artillery or special forces units. They’ve assisted with organizing and broadcasting protests in occupied areas and with reporting Russian atrocities. And they’ve allowed Ukrainian intelligence agencies—aided by IT firms and activists—to counter Russia’s broad disinformation efforts, as well as give Ukrainian troops an edge by monitoring Russian military communications.

In doing so, Ukrainian telecom operators have begun to establish a playbook for future conflicts. Russia’s invasion was the largest offensive operation since World War II, and it’s the first major war in a country with infrastructure as sophisticated as that of Ukraine, where communication and power grids are comparable to those of its European Union neighbors. Matthew Ford, an associate professor with the Swedish Defence University, described it in a phone call from Stockholm as “the most connected battlefield in the world ever.” In that context, winning the information war often means victory. And winning an information war requires a reliable network.

Dmytro Mykytiuk, Ukrtelecom’s chief technical officer, spent the first few days of the invasion drinking cup upon cup of strong black tea in the LCD glow of a laptop screen in his basement. He’d been awakened by the booms of the first missiles hitting around 5 a.m. on Feb. 24, then rushed to his garden in a hastily pulled-on tracksuit to stare in stunned amazement at the large portion of the sky that appeared to be on fire over nearby Boryspil International Airport. His chief executive officer, Yuriy Kurmaz, called 10 minutes later. “It is a war, Dima,” Kurmaz told him. Mykytiuk collected himself enough to start running through checks and plans. What exactly was happening? Had their fiber-optic networks been affected? How should they proceed?

The bulk of Ukrtelecom infrastructure seemed to be functioning, but there were already connectivity issues, and Russian troops were advancing fast toward the capital from the Belarusian border. Kurmaz and Mykytiuk ordered that their headquarters on Kyiv’s broad Taras Shevchenko Boulevard be cleared of people and of information that might be useful to an invading force. It had been the main telecommunications hub during the Soviet era, too, so Russian intelligence would’ve known all about it. They arranged for key personnel to be dispersed farther west, and they had shelters set up in regional offices to evacuate employees and their families.

In Kyiv’s predominantly residential Left Bank and northern outskirts, many of the responsibilities fell to Bespalova. An energetic 60, with light blond hair, a fondness for floral patterns and retirement on the horizon, she’d slept through the first explosions, dismissing a colleague’s early morning call delivering the news as a prank. After all, she’d passed the previous workday enveloped in reassuring routine at her spacious office, with its spearmint walls and paperwork-piled desk, and she and her husband, Leonid, had gone to bed in a country at peace. A second call, and she was hurrying to work, arriving around 7:30 a.m. in a quiet panic, to calls from staff saying they’d be staying home or joining the stunned, scared crowds who were making for stations clutching bags and loved ones or gridlocking the roads west. Bespalova reassured them that they wouldn’t face disciplinary measures for leaving. As the morning wore on she found three-quarters of her team missing.

The exception was her engineering crews, who were all present and waiting to be dispatched. Bespalova, who’d worked in the same building for nearly 40 years, knew most of them well—dependable family men with decades of experience digging, patching and cabling. They’d obviously realized they would be needed for whatever was to come.

By midday, after Zelenskiy had declared martial law, in a video filmed in his office using an upward-tilted phone camera, a line of armed figures in mismatched camouflage had formed outside the metal gates of Bespalova’s office. They were volunteers with the newly formed Territorial Defense Forces, and they wanted help connecting fixed phone lines to command centers from the positions they were digging around the city, in case cell coverage was knocked out.

Bespalova had never imagined war would come to Kyiv, but the local residents who were taking up arms still knew to go to her. She put aside her shock to appoint a military liaison from her staff and started sending engineers out to lay cables for the soldiers. Soon she had some employees in the office kitchen cooking food for the troops and others setting up a bomb shelter in the basement. Then reports of damage and official requests from security services and government bodies started coming in. She saw to those, too, quickly earning a nickname among the men and women battling to defend the city: the Mother of the Left Bank.

Her colleagues at Ukrtelecom and others in their sector had two advantages that helped them weather the opening stages of the invasion. One was their experience during the Covid‑19 pandemic, during which they’d created secure remote working conditions. The other was that this wasn’t their first brush with warfare. Russia had infringed on Ukrainian sovereignty eight years earlier, when its forces annexed Crimea and separatist proxies declared independent “republics” in the eastern Donbas region, setting off fighting that had killed more than 14,000 people by the end of 2021. Telecom companies had to maintain operations then, too, amid shelling, displacement and occupation. “For us,” Olga Ustinova, CEO of Vodafone Ukraine, told me, “the war started in 2014.”

Neither she nor anyone else I spoke to while reporting this piece had expected anything on the scale of the February invasion, however, despite increasingly threatening rhetoric from Russian President Vladimir Putin and increasingly urgent warnings from the US. Their contingency plans had accounted for scenarios such as an escalation in the east, or perhaps tactical strikes, but by no means a full-scale offensive.

The unthinkable came with such force that whole regions were cut off before anyone knew what was happening. In Ivankiv, 30 miles northwest of the capital, Andrii Melnychenko, a 46-year-old Ukrtelecom engineer, heard the blasts and watched the smoke rising from his window. Not long after, he took a video on his phone of armored vehicles and trucks daubed with the identifying white “V” markings used by the invading force speeding by on a main road. The power was soon out, and cell and internet services damaged, making it impossible for residents to find out what was happening beyond their streets or shelters. During the blackout, a phone signal became as valuable as the bread or water that Melnychenko would walk miles to collect for his family. It was the same farther south in Borodyanka, where Russian troops took a large Ukrtelecom building as a base and set up positions in a room with a good view down the main street. Desperate for news, a few people began climbing to the top floors of the town’s apartment blocks to send messages or make calls, despite worries about Russian snipers.

Vodafone’s Ustinova lived just outside Kyiv, too. She began running the company from her own basement, until the Russians got close enough that a Ukrainian artillery unit began digging an emplacement in her garden. After that, she and her husband evacuated, passing a column of tanks moving in the opposite direction.

To keep a network running in the war’s opening days and weeks was to tackle an unceasing procession of crises. Infrastructure was knocked out every hour or two, including the electricity lines powering nodes, cell towers and almost everything else. Some of the damage was caused by troops digging themselves in to shelter from attacks and unintentionally snagging cables. Engineering crews kept working, frequently coordinating with Ukrainian forces, demining teams and power companies. And they weren’t doing so only for their own employers. After Feb. 24, Ukraine’s once highly competitive telecommunications sector became a cooperative of sorts. CTOs kept in regular touch via a WhatsApp messaging group, according to Mykytiuk, the Ukrtelecom executive. If one had issues they couldn’t solve alone, others would help out.

Ustinova recalled a Vodafone employee who’d stayed on as Russian forces bombarded the southeastern city of Mariupol, keeping the company’s sole remaining way station online with a diesel generator. When that way station, too, was destroyed, the worker provided the diesel to another operator that was doing the same with one of its stations. “For now,” Mykytiuk told me, everyone has “forgotten the word ‘competition.’ ”

Usage demands increased and shifted dramatically. Attempted calls on Kyivstar’s network doubled at the start of the war, CTO Volodymyr Lutchenko told me. Meanwhile, the millions of people fleeing Ukraine increased the load on roaming channels threefold in the first week and a half. Huge numbers also moved to the western countryside, creating more rural users than had ever been envisaged, many of whom were trying to watch data-intensive news and social media videos. “And of course,” Lutchenko said, “our network was not ready for this.” To ease the pressure, they began working with suppliers such as Ericsson, Huawei and ZTE to add more than 100 bases.

Cell networks were also being weaponized by Ukraine’s military and intelligence agencies to gain a battlefield advantage. Russia appears to have had issues establishing secure military communications channels, and soldiers sometimes resorted to cellphones, allowing them to be monitored, tracked and eventually targeted. Asked about possible involvement, representatives for Vodafone and Kyivstar said they had no way to listen in on calls, and Ukrtelecom’s Mykytiuk declined to comment.

March came, and with it began what Mykytiuk described as the hardest period of the war. The battle for Kyiv was growing desperate, and a column of Russian armor some 40 miles long snaked around the north of the city. Encirclement was a real possibility. Ukrtelecom began experiencing sophisticated cyberattacks aimed at commandeering or knocking out its systems, including one particularly dangerous attempt using compromised staff credentials from its office in occupied Kherson that required the company to halt regional operations for hours. “If the attack was successful, they could have totally destroyed all of our network in the whole of Ukraine,” Mykytiuk said.

In the end, the Russian offensive on Kyiv met far fiercer resistance than Putin and his generals appear to have expected. By April their overstretched forces had stalled and retreated back across Ukraine’s northern border. In addition to equipment and destroyed vehicles, they left behind grim evidence of abuses and atrocities against civilians. Some of the most egregious took place in towns or areas where communications had been shut down. Without a link to the outside world, some Russian soldiers had apparently acted with impunity.

Telecom companies pushed up close behind the Ukrainian counterattack in areas such as Bucha and Irpin, scrambling to get at least some services to trapped and traumatized residents. Ukrtelecom’s fiber optics were “totally destroyed” Mykytiuk said, and electricity was out, too. The company building in Borodyanka that Russian forces had used as a base was raked with gunfire, its windows shattered and chunks torn out of its walls. On the door of one of the rooms, someone had taped a piece of paper with an order written in black ballpoint: “Do not pee here! (fire position).”

Vodafone’s Ustinova visited Bucha just two days after it was retaken, while bodies were still being discovered strewn across streets or dumped in basements and shallow mass graves. More than three months later, she told me, she felt as if the smell was still with her.

For those who were finally able to speak with friends and family again, the efforts to restore communications meant everything. On a July afternoon, leaning against his battered car, Serhiy, a Borodyanka taxi driver who lived through the occupation and asked to be identified by only his first name, told me that after Ukrainian forces arrived, it seemed like half of the town’s residents emerged onto devastated streets to throng around a patch of signal by the fence of the local orphanage. Natalia Timofeyeva, an immaculately dressed 60-year-old with platinum hair and neat makeup, explained how a sliver of Kyivstar reception had been the only thing that had allowed her to work out a plan to evacuate.

Once the most pressing emergencies were dealt with, the telecom operators began reinforcing their networks, building in more safeguards and redundancies than would normally be needed by a civilian operation. Mykytiuk said Ukrtelecom quadrupled its internet capacity, activating existing backups, building out more, increasing efficiency and leasing channels from other companies. Disconnecting any major population center would now be far more difficult for an attacking force. Cyberattacks continued at the rate of around 10 per week, he added, but Ukrtelecom’s security department was dealing with them.

The measures Ukrainian companies have taken are likely of great interest to other European countries threatened by Russia, as well as to any government attempting to safeguard its infrastructure against a possible aggressor state. Mykytiuk said that Ukrtelecom was sharing operational details with a counterpart elsewhere in eastern Europe and that it “constantly” receives invitations from others in the industry to discuss wartime experiences.

Ford, of the Swedish Defence University, suggested to me that Taiwanese authorities might have created and pre-positioned a digital infrastructure of their own. “Should China invade, cut off the internet and try to stamp out opposition like they have done in Hong Kong,” he said, “I’d expect all the imagery of their occupation to be all over the web fairly quickly as the data gets leaked out to the world.”

After Russia’s retreat from the area around Kyiv, Putin’s focus shifted to an offensive aimed at taking the entire Donbas region while his forces attempted to consolidate control of occupied areas. In Kherson, which has since been liberated but was then on the Russian side of the southern front, that included systematically shutting down the remaining fixed-line, cell and broadband networks operated by companies in Ukrainian-controlled territory. Russian troops intimidated employees, Mykytiuk said, and physically breached infrastructure.

In mid-May they got to Ukrtelecom’s network. Mykytiuk and his team were initially able to migrate traffic and users to Kyivstar fiber optics, then—when those were disconnected—to Eurotranstelecom LLC’s. That service, too, was cut on June 1, and Ukrtelecom staff subsequently received a call from men whom Mykytiuk assumed to be in the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), offering to reconnect them through Crimea, where telecom infrastructure had long been under Russian control. That would’ve placed their customers in the grip of Russia’s censorship and surveillance apparatus.

“We decided not to recover our fiber-optic connections in Kherson and to stop our business in Kherson,” Mykytiuk said. “We do not collaborate with Russia.” Some local providers chose differently, however, and began operating in full compliance with Moscow. Their users became subject to the same internet restrictions Russians were, and they became far easier for occupation authorities to track down.

The Donbas offensive largely targeted areas that Ukrainian forces had been fortifying since 2014. It involved artillery battles over sprawling frontlines that favored Russia’s overwhelming advantages in numbers and firepower. Russian guns were soon bombarding Ukrainian positions with an estimated 60,000 shells a day, and a Zelenskiy aide said in early June that as many as 200 troops were dying every day. When I visited the Donbas three weeks later, medical teams who were speeding a constant stream of ambulances to the front and back described horrendous casualties. Troops said they were often only able to huddle in trenches under the relentless barrages.

Telecom engineers continued to work. In Ukrainian-held Bakhmut, on the Donbas front, that included Oleksander Leontiev and his crew. Leontiev, who was born in the town and has worked there since 1996, sent his family west in early April, as the fighting got worse, but himself stayed to maintain the Ukrtelecom network.

Bakhmut has been close to hostilities since 2014, so Leontiev’s crew was accustomed to navigating the checkpoints and minefields of militarized zones. But that had been a different kind of war, he told me in a Skype call. Back then, both Ukrainian forces and separatist fighters had relied on Ukrtelecom’s network, so his team had been able to negotiate local cease-fires to carry out repair work. One, to cover a particularly big job in 2015, lasted an entire week.

The invasion brought violence on a scale he’d never seen. “We can hear shelling all the time,” he said. His crew still went out most days, taking particular care if they were close to anything Russian forces might target. They repaired fiber-optic links in craters that could swallow an SUV, picked through the remnants of destroyed buildings and traversed pitted roads and fields littered with the detritus of war. The previous day, Leontiev said, they’d been working from a position where they could see and hear the shots and the impacts of shells.

I spoke with Leontiev from Kyiv, where the war now felt a long way off. Shops, bars and restaurants were open. Families strolled through carefully tended parks and lay on the sandy banks of the Dnieper. Air raid siren wails interrupted now and again, but they were mostly ignored. Central Kyiv hadn’t been targeted for weeks, and it would stay that way until Oct. 10, when an onslaught of Russian missiles struck populated areas across Ukraine—the start of an ongoing campaign to cripple civilian infrastructure.

Mykytiuk, Ustinova and Lutchenko all welcomed me in their reopened offices, while the Ukrtelecom engineering team that had carried out the Pushcha-Vodytsya mission retraced their route for me one sunny afternoon, a waltz playing on the car radio. The village had changed again, bullet holes covered by fresh paint and wreckage dragged away, so the men mostly described things as they’d briefly been. “You should have seen it before,” they told me at one spot, sounding slightly disappointed. “All the damage is gone now.” A man appeared from a neighboring house and introduced himself. “I was here,” he said. “It was hell. Rockets were flying, shells were falling.”

Bespalova had insisted on coming with us, sitting wedged into the back of a van next to Lobaiev, the burly cable man, and chatting happily with her staff. The Mother of the Left Bank was still hard at work. When I visited her building, staff in the checkerboard-tiled kitchen were loading plastic tubs with hefty meatballs, coleslaw and cherry cake for the Territorial Defense. They were cooking for far fewer now, Bespalova said, but the local unit still messaged each morning to say how much they were looking forward to the food. In the next room a group of women were busy tying on strips of material to camouflage netting. Ukrainian forces were preparing for a series of counteroffensives, including in Kharkiv and the Donbas, that would retake hundreds of square miles of ground. Telecom companies would again move in fast to restore connectivity to devastated towns and cities.

Bespalova’s son, himself a father of three young children, had joined the army and was about to be deployed to the Donbas. She was worried. “My whole family believes in victory,” she later told me. “But I’m still really anxious.” The worst thing, she said, was that she and Leonid wouldn’t be able to stay in touch with their boy because strict operational security measures prohibited front-line soldiers from speaking regularly with their families. This blackout wasn’t one she could fix.

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