Three workers at Ukraine’s Sloviansk Thermal Power Plant were killed on the morning of February 17 when a Russian drone slammed into their car on the road to work. A fourth worker survived with injuries. The attack happened in Mykolaivka, a small town about 10 kilometers from the front line in the Kramatorsk district of eastern Ukraine’s Donetsk region.
First Deputy Energy Minister Artem Nekrasov confirmed the deaths at a briefing, saying the drone struck as the workers traveled to the plant in a civilian vehicle. Emergency responders found the car on fire. The State Emergency Service said crews put out the blaze and treated the surviving worker before handing him over to paramedics.
A Night of 425 Missiles and Drones
The workers were killed during one of the largest combined strikes on Ukraine’s power grid this year. Beginning overnight on February 16, Russia launched 425 aerial weapons, a mix of missiles and drones, at infrastructure across 12 regions. Power went out for consumers in Dnipropetrovsk, Odesa, Donetsk, Kharkiv, and Zaporizhzhia. Heating failed in the cities of Sumy and Odesa, where nighttime temperatures make even short outages dangerous.
DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy company, said one of its thermal plants in the Odesa region took what it called extremely serious damage. Rolling blackouts hit most affected areas, and repair crews could only begin restoration where security conditions allowed.
A Plant That Keeps Getting Hit
The Sloviansk plant sits in one of the most exposed positions of any energy facility still running in Ukraine. It has been knocked offline multiple times since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in 2022.
In October 2025, a Russian glide bomb hit the plant’s laboratory building, killing two employees and injuring five. With three more now dead and a fourth wounded, the facility has lost workers whose specialized knowledge of its systems is not something you can recruit off the street, especially when the job now comes with the risk of being killed on your morning commute.
The Ministry of Energy did not soften the message. “This is another reminder of how high the price of light and heat in our homes is,” the agency wrote. “Sincere condolences to all who lost their relatives and friends.”
Cheap Drones, Precise Kills
The weapon that hit the car in Mykolaivka was a first-person-view drone, a small device piloted through an onboard camera that lets an operator pick out a single vehicle on a road and fly directly into it. Some Russian units now use fiber-optic control cables that make the drones nearly impossible to jam, and their effective range from the front line has been growing steadily.
This was not an isolated attack on workers. On February 1, a drone hit a service bus carrying miners in the Donetsk region, killing 12 and wounding 16. A DTEK repair crew recently came under drone fire in the Dnipropetrovsk region; their vehicle was destroyed, though no one died.
In each case, the targets were civilians traveling exposed roads in unmarked vehicles to keep essential services running in communities within strike range.
When You Can’t Replace the People
A destroyed transformer can be rebuilt with foreign aid and manufacturing capacity. A killed engineer who understood the specific turbines, wiring, and control systems at a plant like Sloviansk cannot. Since October 2025, this one facility has lost five workers killed and six more injured across just two attacks. That is a significant share of the specialized staff needed to keep a wartime power plant running.
For the communities around the Sloviansk plant that depend on it for heat and electricity, those losses translate directly into longer blackouts and colder homes. Repair crews get smaller, response times stretch, and workers who might accept a frontline posting think twice when colleagues are killed on the drive in. The three deaths on February 17 will not register as a major headline. But they will be felt through the rest of this winter and into the next one.
