Home › Opinion › Energy war and energy graft on 17 February 2026
Energy war and energy graft on 17 February 2026
Summary
A retrospective on a day when Russian strikes killed power engineers in Donetsk Oblast while a corruption case over the energy sector dominated the days before it.
What did the energy sector look like in Ukraine on 17 February 2026? It was a place of physical danger and legal scrutiny at once.
On that day, three engineers from the Sloviansk Thermal Power Plant were killed and another was injured in a Russian drone attack on a vehicle in Mykolaivka, Donetsk Oblast. The attack was part of the Russian strikes against Ukrainian infrastructure in the eastern campaign. Also on 17 February, large-scale Russian strikes on Sumy Oblast injured at least six people and damaged buildings and vehicles.
A corruption case in the same sector
Two days earlier, on 15 February 2026, Ukraine's National Anti-Corruption Bureau arrested former energy minister German Galushchenko at the state border. He was detained over his alleged involvement in a ₴4 billion (about US$100 million) kickback scheme in the energy sector, under the investigation known as Operation Midas. Ukrainian reports at the time said he was arrested while trying to leave the country by train.
Background on the investigation describes it as a probe by the bureau and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office, launched in 2024, into large-scale bribery in the energy sector during the war. Its data collection lasted 15 months and involved more than 70 searches, the seizure of 4 million US dollars and about 1,000 hours of recorded conversations of suspects.
Strikes on both sides
The energy theme ran across the front line as well. On 15 February, authorities in several Russian oblasts, including Belgorod and Bryansk, reported widespread power outages after a large-scale Ukrainian missile and drone attack on Russian power stations. Bryansk Oblast governor Alexander Bogomaz confirmed that the regional capital, Bryansk, had lost most of its electricity and heat supply.
Taken together, the reports from 15 to 17 February 2026 show energy as a point of pressure in several ways: a target for strikes in both countries, a workplace where engineers were killed, and the subject of an alleged multimillion-dollar kickback scheme.
