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An army of engineers from the country’s phone firms has organized to assist the people and officials remain in contact with frequent Russian missile and drone attacks as Ukraine struggles to maintain communication channels throughout the conflict.
The engineers regularly labor around the clock to maintain or restore phone service, sometimes navigating minefields in the process. They are often unheralded and unnoticed during times of peace. They turned up generators to keep the towers running after Russian attacks knocked off the energy that the towers typically operate on.
Yuriy Dugnist, an engineer with Ukrainian telecommunications firm Kyivstar, said after trudging through a half-foot of fresh snow to reach a fenced-in mobile phone tower on the western outskirts of Kyiv, the country’s capital: “I know our guys — my colleagues — are very exhausted, but they’re motivated by the fact that we are doing an important thing.
Dugrist and his coworkers provided a peek into their new daily routines, which included checking an app on their phones to see which of the numerous phone towers in the capital region were receiving electricity, either during breaks from the controlled blackouts being used to conserve energy or from the generators that kick in to provide backup power.
“Low Fuel” was ominously written in one entry.
Before starting their rounds, the crew stopped at a gas station to fill eight 20-liter (5.3 gallon) jerrycans with diesel fuel for a large tank below a generator that supplies power to a 60-foot cell tower in a suburban community that had been without electricity for days.
It is one of several Ukrainian towns that have had sporadic electricity or none at all as a result of many destructive Russian airstrikes that have recently targeted the nation’s infrastructure, particularly its power facilities.
With over 26 million clients, Kyivstar is the biggest of Ukraine’s three major mobile phone providers. This is comparable to almost two-thirds of the country’s population when Russia invaded on February 24; many people have since returned.
Long before the invasion, the diesel generators at the base of the mobile phone towers were already in place, although they were seldom used. Similar generators and transformers have been given by other Western nations to assist Ukraine in maintaining energy as much as feasible in the wake of Russia’s assault.
In order to troubleshoot the 2,500 mobile stations in their service area after emergency blackouts brought on by a wave of Russian attacks on Nov. 23, Kyivstar simultaneously dispatched 15 teams of engineers and called in “all our reserves,” according to Dugrist.
When Russian troops left Irpin, a suburb northwest of Kyiv, earlier this year, he recalls running to the scene of a collapsed cell tower and being there before Ukrainian minesweepers came to deliver the all-clear signal.
According to reports, rates for satellite phone alternatives like Elon Musk’s Starlink system, which Ukraine’s military has utilized throughout the conflict, which is now in its tenth month, have increased due to the burden the war is placing on the country’s mobile phone networks.
Following last week’s severe infrastructure attacks, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky gathered senior authorities to discuss the necessary supplies and repair work to protect the nation’s electricity and communication infrastructures.
Special attention is given to the communication infrastructure, he added, adding that “we must continue contact” regardless of what Russia has in mind.
»Ukrainian engineers labor to fix cell phones«