A document dated August 2026 and obtained by the Ukrainian service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty from an unnamed source in Ukraine's defense forces lists Ukraine's power generation, water supply, wastewater treatment facilities and heating system as four priority target categories, a total of 60 facilities that also include the country's hydroelectric and nuclear power plants, according to a report published 9 October 2026 by Uacrisis.org. The report, which also covers a Russian glide-bomb strike on passenger buses in Kramatorsk the same morning, cites The New York Times for parallel reporting on the same document and for the claim that Ukrainian energy minister Denys Shmyhal showed the plan to European partners in Paris two weeks earlier.
Key takeaways
- Russian planning document dated August 2026 names 60 priority targets across four systems, including wastewater treatment facilities, Uacrisis.org.
- Kyiv, Kharkiv and Odesa are highlighted as top targets, with plans to cut electricity by 90 percent, reduce heating by up to 90 percent and "severely disrupt the sewage system," Uacrisis.org.
- Other listed "priority cities" include Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia, Mykolayiv, Kherson, Poltava, Chernihiv, Kryvyi Rih, Cherkasy, Kropyvnytskyi, Lviv, Vinnytsya and Ivano-Frankivsk, Uacrisis.org.
- The plan calls for 770 Molniya and Geran drones plus Dan-T/Banderol missile-drones, 170 FAB aerial bombs and 75 Kinzhal and Iskander-M ballistic missiles, Uacrisis.org.
- Specific weapon counts are listed per asset, including 25 Molniya/Geran drones, Dan-T/Banderol missile-drones or three Kinzhal missiles to disable a hydroelectric power plant, Uacrisis.org.
What the leaked plan describes
The plan, titled "Analytical note: Analysis of Ukraine's power generation and public utilities," lays out three stages of attack, according to The New York Times as cited by Uacrisis.org. The first would knock out substations near Ukraine's western borders that import electricity from Europe; the second would take out hydroelectric power plants; the third would force Ukraine's three operating nuclear plants offline. Beyond these three stages, the document also lists interconnectors, power substations, boiler houses, sewage facilities, water pumping stations and other sites that the authors describe as indispensable for the supply of power, water, heating and sewage.
Weapon counts are matched to specific asset types. The document lists two Iskander-M missiles as the weapons needed to disable a nuclear power station, and 25 Molniya and Geran drones, Dan-T/Banderol missile-drones or three Kinzhal missiles to disable a hydroelectric power plant, the same allocation used for a combined heat and power plant that has five power transformers, Uacrisis.org. To disable a combined heat and power plant without specifying the transformer count, the document plans 25 FAB-500 aerial bombs and five Iskander-M missiles. The same report notes that The New York Times has highlighted a similar plan in an article published the previous week.
The plan's targeting of wastewater treatment facilities alongside substations, boiler houses and pumping stations is the operational fact most relevant to plant managers and procurement leads reading this report. The same 9 October 2026 Uacrisis.org dispatch frames the document as evidence of "the scale of Russia's ambition to freeze Ukrainians into submission," citing two people familiar with the Paris presentation.
Specification read: what a buyer should recognise in this event
The 9 October 2026 report does not name any specific wastewater treatment plant, nor does it report a capacity in m³/day or a population equivalent for the facilities on the list, so the asset class can only be described generically as municipal sewage plants within the cities named. The S1 source also does not report a flow, BOD or COD figure for any of the listed facilities, so any buyer-side recognition must be built from the targeting logic rather than from a published capacity. The treatment train a municipal plant of this class would normally require — screening, primary clarification, biological treatment (an A2O, MBR, MBBR, SBR or UASB stage sized to the influent load), tertiary polishing and disinfection — is the same stage set whose electrical supply, pumping and sludge-handling subsystems the document treats as co-equal with substations and boiler houses.
The event bears directly on the electrical and hydraulic resilience stage of that train: the document groups wastewater treatment facilities with power substations, boiler houses and water pumping stations as targets that, in the plan's wording, are "indispensable for the supply of power, water, heating and sewage," Uacrisis.org. For procurement leads, the recognition sentence is that any municipal Municipal plant serving one of the named cities — Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa or any of the 11 other priority cities — and relying on grid power for blowers, return-activated-sludge pumps, UV banks and dewatering centrifuges is, in this document, classed alongside transmission assets, not as civilian infrastructure. The same logic applies to Industries We Serve with on-site pretreatment or zero-liquid-discharge trains, where loss of power to a DAF, RO or thermal system for more than a few hours can invert the plant's compliance picture. Buyers scoping standby generation, dual feeds from neighbouring substations, on-site biogas-fuelled CHP, or black-start-capable blower rooms are working in the same risk register the leaked plan uses.
FAQ
Which Ukrainian wastewater facilities are named in the leaked plan?
The 9 October 2026 report identifies the asset class as "wastewater treatment facilities" within a list of 60 priority targets across four systems, but does not name any specific plant, city-level facility or capacity, Uacrisis.org.
What does the plan say about Kyiv, Kharkiv and Odesa specifically?
The plan highlights those three cities as the main targets and proposes cutting electricity supplies by 90 percent, reducing heating supplies by up to 90 percent and "severely disrupting the sewage system," according to The New York Times as cited by Uacrisis.org.
How much lead time would a buyer expect for the resilience upgrades this document implies?
The S1 source does not report procurement lead times, equipment delivery windows or contract values for standby power, dual feeds or CHP packages at any of the named plants, so no delivery range can be quoted from the supplied text.
Is there a published contract, award or tender tied to this plan?
No. The 9 October 2026 Uacrisis.org report describes a targeting document, not a procurement action, and does not list any awarded contract, tender reference or supplier for the facilities named in it.
