A wartime infrastructure target, not a peacetime nice-to-have
On August 17, 2026, Ukraine's Cabinet of Ministers, under new Prime Minister Serhii Koretskyi, approved a Government Action Program and sent it to the Verkhovna Rada for review. Buried inside its operational goals for the Ministry of Digital Transformation is a concrete telecom target: at least 70% of the country's mobile base stations must be able to run for a minimum of 72 hours without grid electricity, on batteries and generators, by the end of 2027 (Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine; Interfax-Ukraine).
This is not a hypothetical resilience exercise. Russia has spent this war deliberately targeting the grid that keeps Ukraine's phones and routers alive. On November 10, 2025, a single barrage of more than 450 drones and 45 cruise and ballistic missiles hit energy infrastructure nationwide, plunging Kyiv and other cities into blackouts lasting up to 12 hours and producing the internet and communications outages that NetBlocks documented across the country. Vodafone, Ukraine's second-largest operator, said the outages forced it to throttle its own network because "when the power goes out, everyone immediately switches to mobile internet, which causes an extremely high load on the connection" (The Record).
The case for the mandate is genuinely strong
Before critiquing the policy, it deserves a fair hearing. Mobile connectivity in Ukraine is not a consumer convenience — it is the rail air-raid alerts travel on, the channel families use to confirm they're alive after a strike, and increasingly the payment network for a economy that has shifted hard toward mobile banking as physical infrastructure degrades. Grid attacks and telecom outages are not separate problems; Russia treats them as the same target, because collapsing connectivity alongside power maximizes civilian disruption and complicates emergency response. A government mandate that forces operators to internalize this risk, rather than treating backup power as a discretionary capex line, is a defensible use of regulatory authority precisely because the externality — a dark, disconnected city during a missile barrage — falls on the public, not the shareholders.
But the target is a big jump from where the industry actually is
The 70%/72-hour goal is a major escalation from the prior regulatory baseline. Under a July 2024 rule from Ukraine's telecom regulator, operators were required to bring 100% of base stations up to just 10 hours of backup power by February 1, 2025, with a separate, narrower requirement that only 25% of stations sustain 72 hours. The new Cabinet program roughly triples that 72-hour cohort.
The more important number is where compliance actually stands today. The Ministry of Digital Transformation's own reporting puts it plainly: 92% of base stations can run autonomously for up to 8 hours on battery alone; beyond that, connectivity past 72 hours depends on technicians physically connecting diesel generators, which is why the ministry has been running a certification course for "generator operators" on the Diia.Osvita platform (Ministry of Digital Transformation). In other words, the headline 72-hour figure that officials cite today is largely a manual, labor-dependent workaround, not a passive engineering capability. Turning that into an unattended, automated 70% baseline is a materially harder and more capital-intensive problem than the political framing suggests.
Cost is the part the program doesn't answer
The previous, much smaller 10-hour mandate was not free. Kyivstar, Vodafone, and lifecell together spent more than 13 billion hryvnias — north of $300 million — complying with it, according to the Ministry's own account of industry costs (dev.ua). Minister Oksana Ferchuk, who took over the ministry in July 2026, has said she wants stations to run "for several days, not just hours," but the Cabinet program approved on August 17 sets the target without specifying financing, tax relief, generator import support, or a compliance timeline more granular than "2026-2027."
That is the pattern worth watching. Ukraine's regulators have shown they can write ambitious backup-power numbers into policy; they have shown far less consistently that they can fund or enforce them without simply passing the bill to three operators already absorbing wartime losses in subscribers and revenue. A mandate that isn't paired with cost-sharing — accelerated depreciation on generators and batteries, customs relief on imported equipment, or co-investment tied to the same program's parallel 5G pilot in Kyiv, Lviv, Kharkiv, Odesa, and Borodianka — risks becoming a target operators quietly slip past rather than one they hit on schedule, just as the original February 2025 100% figure for basic backup power took longer to reach in practice than the regulation implied.
The proportionate path
The right response to Russia's grid war is not to relax the target; degraded connectivity during blackouts is a real harm the state is right to legislate against. It is to pair the mandate with the financing mechanism the August 17 program currently omits, and to publish compliance data by operator and region so the 70% figure is auditable rather than aspirational. Ukraine's telecom sector has absorbed extraordinary shocks since 2022 without state subsidy; asking it to triple a resilience commitment on the same unfunded basis is the one part of an otherwise sound policy that deserves scrutiny before the Rada signs off.