It was part of an ongoing effort to align with Europe and decrease reliance on Russia, which had repeatedly threatened Ukraine’s sovereignty. Ukraine initiated the process of joining Europe’s grid in 2005 and began working toward that goal in earnest in 2017, as did Moldova.
“No power system has ever synchronized this quickly before.” “For to move this quickly and with such agility is unprecedented,” says Paul Deane, an energy policy researcher at the University College Cork in Ireland. It was “ a year’s work in two weeks,” according to a statement by Kadri Simson, the European Union commissioner for energy. On March 16 they reached the key milestone of synchronizing the two systems. Ukraine’s connection to Europe-which was not supposed to occur until 2023-became urgent, and engineers aimed to safely achieve it in just a matter of weeks. But four hours after the exercise started, Russia invaded. The test was a requirement for eventually linking with the European grid, which Ukraine had been working toward since 2017. The long-planned disconnection was meant to be a 72-hour trial proving that Ukraine could operate on its own. On February 24 Ukraine’s electric grid operator disconnected the country’s power system from the larger Russian-operated network to which it had always been linked.
