Eight kilometers from the front line in Kramatorsk, they are preparing for winter like this: the management of the heat and power company is selling obsolete equipment for scrap metal to buy fuel for vehicles that are sent out to eliminate emergencies on the networks. This is not a one-time desperate measure, but a way of survival for the enterprise that is responsible for heating a city of 52,000 people.
There is money, but not for private companies
The Cabinet of Ministers officially eased the burden on front-line communities — lowering the co-financing threshold for resilience plans to 10% instead of the standard 20%. In practice, this did not help Kramatorsk: LLC "Kramatorsk Heat and Power" did not receive a single hryvnia of state funding in either 2025 or 2026.
The reason is the form of ownership. Kramatorsk CHP is 60% owned by a private owner, one of the ultimate beneficial owners is Dnipro businessman Oleksandr Petrovskyi. Because of this, most international charitable organizations cannot provide assistance to the company — they are focused on municipal enterprises. The enterprise fell out of both support streams at once: state and donor.
The state owes more than it demands
The most absurd part of the situation is that the accounts of LLC "Kramatorsk Heat and Power" are arrested due to debts for consumed gas, even though the state itself owes the enterprise almost a billion hryvnias in compensation for the tariff difference. It turns out to be a vicious circle: the company cannot pay for gas because the state does not pay it, and the state arrests its accounts for this very debt.
For residents, this is not an abstract financial dispute. If the CHP stops in winter, there is simply no alternative centralized heat supply for a city of this scale.
117 million in a month and a half
The government approved the allocation of 117 million hryvnias to Kramatorsk for the implementation of the resilience plan — the money is supposed to go to protecting transformer substations from drones. But the funds are promised to be received only in a month and a half, and winter does not wait for bureaucratic procedures.
The CHP management has reason to be skeptical: last year the city did not receive anything from the state for the construction of protective structures, although the promises sounded just as confident.
By the end of August, Ukrainian regions completed resilience plans by only 47%, although the government's goal for September 1 was 80%. President Volodymyr Zelensky has already criticized the pace of winter preparations, and the government also acknowledges the lag in communities.
Kramatorsk is not an exception to the general picture, but its sharpest manifestation: the private form of ownership has turned a front-line enterprise into a double failure in the support system built for municipal structures.
The question is simple: will the state manage to unblock accounts and pay off at least part of the debt before the first frosts, or will 52,000 Kramatorsk residents learn about it firsthand through cold radiators?
