The second winter, prepared for in advance

The winter of 2022 was survived by improvisation: crews driving through the night, transformers cannibalised from wherever they could be found, generators wired into hospitals as they arrived.

The winter of 2023 was prepared for. That is a different thing entirely, and it is what a year of sustained international supply buys.

What preparation looked like

Stockpiles. Instead of hunting for a transformer after a strike, the replacement was already in a warehouse, of a specification that matched the equipment it would replace. That single change compresses repair time from weeks to days.

Physical protection for the most critical substations — engineered structures around key equipment, so that a near miss no longer means a destroyed transformer.

Air defence allocated to protect energy infrastructure specifically, which is a decision about priorities as much as about hardware.

And repair crews pre-positioned regionally rather than dispatched from the centre.

Where the support came from

Coordinated equipment donation through European mechanisms and the energy support fund established for this purpose, with partner utilities contributing spare equipment from their own reserves — which is how matching specifications were achieved.

What I would draw from it

Resilience is mostly logistics. The heroism of the first winter was real and it should not have been necessary; by the second winter it had been converted into inventory, procedure and pre-positioning. That conversion is the actual achievement.