Ukraine may follow South Korea’s lead by moving critical infrastructure underground after war

Head of the State Agency for Reconstruction and Development of Infrastructure Sergiy Sukhomlin believes that after the war, Ukraine will have to adopt Korea's experience with the underground placement of critical infrastructure to protect against missiles. He said this said in an interview with LIGA.net.

"The experience of Korea, which we studied, shows that after the war, they simply began to hide all new construction, including energy infrastructure, underground. After the war, we will have no other choice, all new projects will have to be hidden," he said.

This is long and expensive, Sukhomlyn said, so it is now much more efficient to build a second level of defense. "It's a building of about three or four floors made of concrete, steel, other materials with anti-drone nets, heavy or steel ropes against the Shahed drones," he explained.

According to him, such protection has proved effective, and not a single transformer among those protected by the agency has been hit by a drone this year.

However, it is not yet feasible to scale this protection to larger facilities, such as power plants.

"Protecting a large thermal power plant means about five years of work and a sarcophagus, like at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. This is probably tens of billions of hryvnias for one facility. This is an absolutely unrealistic situation. We can only protect the elements of this thermal power plant, which will allow it to operate partially in case of damage," said Sukhomlyn.

• For three years in a row, Russia has been targeting Ukrainian power plants and other energy infrastructure throughout Ukraine, starting in October 2022.
• Ukrenergo believes that the Russians' goal is to gradually bring the power system to an unusable state.