It's quite interesting that they also attacked a substation that looked important on a map, but wasn't actually vital. I think some of the early reporting about this incident suggested they "knew what they were doing", but the apparent misidentification of one of their targets perhaps suggests the perpetrators were making educated guesses, without detailed/insider knowledge of how the system worked.
They knew enough to shoot a part that is filled with fluid and hard to replace.
They might have lacked the knowledge of "the grid" to make such an attack go beyond one county, but there was some degree of thought put into that attack.
I think it probably doesn't take an electrical engineer to figure out that destroying the radiators would put the substation out of action at least temporarily, but it does show they put a bit of thought into it at least. It doesn't seem like a case of a dumbass using the substation for target practice on a whim, it all seems very deliberate and purposeful.
While we don't know, for now, the level of deliberation and knowledge is congruent with various instructional materials that circulate in darker corners of the net (I don't want to name specific publications/sources). You can find pretty detailed advice and discourse about how to plan and execute an attack on the infrastructure unit, ie the substation.
Information about the larger structure of the grid, transmission direction, system redundancies/tolerances, failure cascades is a lot harder to come by. You could build up a picture by accumulating OSINT resources, mapping gaps, making physical observations etc., but synthesizing that into any sort of working model of the grid itself would require some pretty advanced engineering expertise and a lot of institutional knowledge even at the local level. Anyone with sufficient smarts, training, and know-how is a lot more likely to be invested in the integrity of the grid than its sabotage.
Also, in purely economic terms it's not efficient for an antagonist to max out resources on trying to land a decisive masterstroke. It takes a lot of time, money, and moving parts to pull off such an attack. An ongoing rash of cheap micro-attacks, even poorly correlated, drives up costs in ratchet fashion, without any threat being sufficiently expensive to bring about massive change (eg burying major parts of the transmission infrastructure, switching to a different architecture, radically different security posture). The strategic goal is to raise the cost of 'normal' above the market's willingness to bear, and then exploit social/political failure modes.
The damage could have been much more difficult to repair.
"If the windings within the transformer itself were damaged, it would probably require replacement of the equipment. Transformers of this scale are rarely manufactured without an order, which means we don’t have a lot of spares sitting around, and the lead time can be months or years to get a new one delivered, let alone installed."
It's not the radiators, it's the transformator itself.
Shorted winding == complete replacement needed for high voltages, and a single bullet would be more than enought to break insulation on the winding many times.
A lot of infrastructure is built with some concept of defense in mind from public trash cans to nuclear power plants.
The electrical grid is largely ignored because it’s so big and distributed over such a large area it’s difficult for small groups to attack it successfully. So the focus is on limiting cascading failures. Shooting equipment only caused local damage and things got back to normal in a week.
It was unpleasant for those affected, but you can catch people conducting repeated attacks a lot easier than you can harden all this infrastructure.
"The rise was caused by heavy military vehicles stirring contaminated soil in the 4,000-sq-km (2,485 sq-mile) exclusion zone surrounding the abandoned plant, Ukraine's State Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate reported ."
"Close to the reactor, you would normally receive a dose of about three units - called microsieverts - every hour. But on Thursday, that jumped to 65 microSv/hrs - about five times more than you would get on one transatlantic flight."
https://web.archive.org/web/20220225165134/https://www.bbc.c...
65 microSv or 65 µSv is a really trivial amount. It should inspire a yawn not a yikes.
Doesn’t sound trivial. You go on enough high altitude flights, you will suffer cellular damage- and this dose is occurring daily. Furthermore, this current situation could easily worsen if further damage is done to the nuclear plants.
In the current climate I would have assumed it was Russian probing of critical infrastructure. There have been isolated attacks on pipelines, transport, and communication cables in various western countries.
If we are wildly speculating, it's possible that those other targets could have had compatible Hardware. Alternatively, they could have been looking to disable power to something off the secondary branch and hit both for redundancy
the other hit station looks on a map of larger scale as if its connected to the higher voltage national grid. Only with a sufficiently high resolution map can you see that the power-lines are just running in parallel for a bit and that there is a gap.
Since the voltages are that are transformed are different i don't think the transformers would be at all compatible. But i am not an expert either:)
It's possible that their true target was in the neighborhood of the second station, that the second station wasn't actually misidentified. But I guess we'll only know for sure when they get caught.
1. I think we are speculating about intention here. Maybe they were both incorrectly identified as connected to the larger grid. Maybe the smaller one was chosen as a second target for a different reason.
2. Nothing discussed in the video is insider knowledge. Everything is public knowledge, and could have been learned with a library card and an internet connection.
Well, I'm certainly speculating. But assuming this second substation was attacked mistakenly, I think it suggests an absence of insider knowledge. I bet it was planned by a layman looking at such maps, or driving around the county and making note of where things are.
I bet they used the wrong maps. Like a topo or regular driving map. If they'd gone that one step further and gotten the utility GIS layers Tthings could have gotten a lot more out of hand.
