'Ukraine Needs Solar Panels—and Female Labour'

Believe it or not, that kind of nonsense is peddled in Western media as a panacea to the conflict-induced problems Ukraine is facing (facepalm)

As the quagmire in Ukraine drags on, its implications are becoming ever larger—and too big to ignore ‘even’ for some of the weirder (ideologically blinded) legacy media outlets. Today, I’ll bring you a piece that appeared in the far left-wing Austrian daily Der Standard—about Ukraine.

Der Standard has come a long way—back in summer 2022, they were uncritically peddling pro-Azov and Nazi agit-prop. The even published a piece by Philip Malzahn, a freelance reporter™ who went ‘on tour’ with a bunch of troops of the notorious ‘Kraken’ formations, which included—and I’m not making this up—the following gem:

The penchant for far-right symbolism and aesthetics is there nonetheless, coupled with cohesion and determination in battle. ‘Exterminating another people—that’s what the others want, the Rooskies.’

On Tour with the 'Azov' Neo-Nazis: Austrian Media Continues to Delude itself and Gaslight its Readers

We note, in passing, that Der Standard was among the premier spreaders of Branch Covidian nonsense and hate against ‘the unclean’.

And today, dear readers, we’ll check in with them to assess where they are now. Buckle up, it’s gonna be a wild ride.

Translation, emphases, and [snark] mine.

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Energy Security: Ukraine Needs Solar Panels—and Female Labour

Russia has been attacking Ukraine’s electricity supply for years. Solar power systems are seen as a way to protect against outages, but there is a lack of essential/required workers

By Daniela Prugger, Der Standard, 1 June 2025 [source; archived]

Katerina Surova tightens the climbing harness. Then she picks up a helmet, gloves, and snap hooks. Alongside Surova, nine other women are checking their equipment, because this morning they are training to climb for the first time in an unadorned training centre in Kyiv: onto the training roof, which has been attached to the wall of the room at an angle.

Attaching solar panels on roofs: for many people in Ukraine, that’s a way to secure their energy supply. [picture credit: Daniela Prugger].

The course has little to do with sport [no-one in his right mind would think that given that kind of introductory paragraph]. It’s about energy. The aim is to train the participants. They are to learn how to install solar systems wherever they are urgently needed. In Ukraine, this is almost everywhere. Especially in the east of the country, near Surova’s home town of Kharkiv, electricity is not a given. ‘If the shelling starts again, we’ll have problems with the supply again’, says the 35-year-old [so, there has not been a lot of shelling recently, is what she’s saying? Didn’t my telly exhort me that ‘ze Rooskies’ are ‘out to exterminate everyone’?].

The programme, which was launched by Greenpeace Ukraine [why am I not surprised to find them there?] last year, is aimed at women and is being held for the second time. Hundreds applied, ten participants were selected and completed a two-week theoretical block and a practical week [it takes three weeks only to become such a practitioner]. Surova now wants to implement the content into her lessons. She works as a vocational school teacher with trainee electricians. She also wants to take precautions. ‘Maybe we’ll build a small solar system at home. We’ve had a lot of blackouts in the past’, she says.

Living with Uncertainty

However, she was confronted with the war much earlier in her life. In 2014, she had to flee her home, the Donetsk region [so, you’re telling your readers™ now that ‘the war’ began in 2014?] ‘My family owns an apartment in Donetsk [to this day shelled by the Ukrainian army], but I don’t know what condition it’s in’, she says. ‘In Kharkiv, I live in a rented flat because I have no certainty that I can invest money today without a drone or missile hitting tomorrow.’ Life near the front is characterised by great uncertainty—including in the area of energy.

The power supply is currently stable in most parts of the country, explains Andrian Prokip, energy expert at the Ukrainian Institute of the Future in Kyiv [it is ‘a leading research and analytical center in Ukraine. We work on key economic, political and social issues, providing in-depth analysis and forecasting’, according to their website; Mr. Prokip is listed as ‘Senior Fellow at the Kennan Institute (Washington, DC, USA)’, among other things (compare this profile pics: here’s his Wilson Center profile vs. his UIF profile—I’m unsure this is the same guy]:

Only in the frontline regions is the infrastructure frequently damaged by shelling or a drone, but these local problems are usually resolved quickly.

Russia has not carried out any massive attacks on the electricity infrastructure in recent months [I’m confused: for 3+ years, I’ve been told by legacy media that Russia is doing a ‘full-scale invasion’? If so, why wouldn’t they attack the grid and power stations?]. Nevertheless, there will be power cuts again in the summer, says Prokip, as several nuclear power plants will be out of operation for maintenance work [at the same time? Who’s done that kind of planning™?].

Solar panels are one way to protect against future power cuts, says Polina Kolodjaschna from Greenpeace Ukraine [their office opened in 2024]. However, the energy sector is still predominantly represented by men. Due to the mobilisation, there is a lack of male workers on the labour market:

We have received a lot of support and equipment from Europe, and there is a lot of interest in solar systems, especially from smaller communities. So we have the equipment—but not enough people to do the work.

[this is among the known tragedies of war: casualties, and in the Ukrainian case, there’s a lot more to say, for instance (via Wikipedia):

According to the United Nations, Ukraine has a population of 37.9 million as of 2024.^[5]

In July 2023, Reuters reported that due to refugee outflows, the population of Ukrainian-controlled areas may have decreased to 28 million,^[6] a steep decline from Ukraine’s 2020 population of almost 42 million^[7][8]…

Since 2021, the Ukrainian fertility rate has fallen below 1.3, and is now one of the lowest in the world.^[10]

Ponder the causes, consequences, and implications—or engage in feminist BS]

War as an Environmental Disaster

That is why Greenpeace Ukraine, together with other organisations and companies, wants to promote the entry of women into technical professions and break down prejudices, says Kolodjaschna, who co-initiated the project. This is the only way that the country can be rebuilt in a better and sustainable way [remember: there is no alternative]. After all, the war has caused an environmental catastrophe in Ukraine, the consequences of which are not yet foreseeable.

‘Unfortunately, we now have countless diesel generators in Ukraine. For many people, this is a way to survive. But these generators are extremely harmful to the environment’, says Kolodjaschna [aren’t these paragons of humanitarianism?]. Rockets and drones also cause forest fires away from the front line, leaving craters, debris, unexploded ordnance, and mines, killing wildlife and wiping out entire ecosystems [a fair point, although one would have to consider that war is hell and both involved sides do that].

On 14 February, the protective shell over the destroyed Chernobyl reactor 4 was severely damaged by a drone attack [interestingly, while Wikipedia—again, I reference it as it doubles as repository of common knowledge—ascribes the attack to Russia:

On 14 February 2025, a Russian "Geran-2" drone attack significantly damaged the NSC.^[10][11]

However, note that the source (sic) cited (endnote 10) links to an Australian website (archived) whose header notes ‘Zelensky says’. While I claim no particular insights, there is apparently no independent confirmation, but note that the linked website also notes the following:

It was not possible to independently confirm Ukraine’s claim of Russian responsibility…

Russian-installed local officials said the attack on the power plant in the city of Enerhodar had occurred late on February 13, leaving more than 50,000 people without electricity.

And ask yourself the simple question: how plausible is it that Russian forces would ‘attack’ the Chernobyl power plant’s sarcophagus that they themselves control?]. ‘A two billion euro structure designed to protect Ukraine and Europe from radiation was hit by a drone that only cost 20,000 dollars’, says Kolodjaschna—and she reminds us that the protective cover is still damaged [well, why not add that, according to IAEA, as cited by that Aussie website, ‘said the strike occurred at 1.50am local time (10.50am AEDT). It said there was “no indication of a breach in the … inner containment” shell.’].

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Bottom Li(n)es

That’s quite a bit of a piece, ‘even’ (sic) by the depraved standards (sic) of legacy media reporting™, isn’t it? Ms. Prugger, according to this website hosted by Brandeis U,

has been working as a journalist in Ukraine for five years. Since the start of the Russian invasion on 24 February 2022, she has been reporting on the nationwide fighting and the humanitarian situation as a freelance correspondent for the Austrian daily newspaper Der Standard, Ö1 Radio [that would be the news station of the Austrian state broadcaster ORF], and WOZ in Switzerland [that is a left-wing outlet that grew out of the 1968 protests]. In 2023, she received the ‘Award for Outstanding Journalism in Memory of Claus Gatterer’ for her work.

Here’s her freelance/contract a journo™ profile at Freischreiber.de and here’s her LinkedIn profile.

None of that kind of background information played much of a role; I now know she studied (sic) journalism in Vienna, Seville, Spain, and Reutlingen, Germany; for several years, Ms. Prugger has been doing foreign reporting from Ukraine. That, of course, takes some balls, so to speak, but we note that, unlike frontline correspondents like Patrick Lancaster or Eva K. Bartlett who report from ‘the other side’ of that conflict, Ms. Prugger’s reporting took her to the Ukrainian-only side, with pieces from Kharkiv, Isjum, Solotschiw, Kherson, Mykolaiv, Lviv, and Sumy, among other places.

There are no publicly available and/or disclosed funding sources for the two (GO)NGOs mentioned, the Ukrainian Institute for the Future or Greenpeace Ukraine. That would have been a point of enquiry for any kind of self-respecting investigator, alas, Ms. Prugger simply relies on the information provided by the people she met.

Interestingly, since the Kennan Institute and Wilson Center are involved with the Ukrainian Institute for the Future, I think that part of their funding comes, however indirectly, from the US ‘intelligence community’. As to Greenpeace, well, what can one say? Their ‘About’ section relates the time-tested story™ of an intrepid civil society organisation directly, and explicitly so, linking Greenpeace Ukraine to the original Rainbow Warrior.

Similarly, neither the massive Ukrainian casualties of young men in the age bracket 20-40 are discussed nor do the final paragraph’s insinuations about the Russian forces allegedly attacking the Chernobyl nuclear plant (which, as an aside, kinda ‘hangs there’ with little to know connection to the gist of the piece) they themselves control merit the journos™ attention.

We do get several pieces of—unintentionally disclosed—admissions of stuff that used to be denied vigorously by legacy media for years, including the reminiscences of Ms. Surova who had to flee Donetsk in 2014 due to fighting or the tacit admission that the Russian ‘full-scale invasion’ of 2022 was—but a media ruse concocted in tandem with politicos™ and the intel community™:

Only in the frontline regions is the infrastructure frequently damaged by shelling or a drone, but these local problems are usually resolved quickly.

Russia has not carried out any massive attacks on the electricity infrastructure in recent months.

So, this where we are at the moment: a legacy media journo™ with several accolades and prizes under her belt, who covers but one side of a more complex conflict travelled to Kyiv, Ukraine.

There, she kinda admits that there’s much more to the narrative of ‘Russia’s unprovoked full-scale invasion’—and Ms. Prugger fails to ask any of the standard questions related to her claimed profession: nothing about the origins of the conflict, the way Russia has been conducting its ‘special military operation’, or the shady financial background of the two (GO)NGOs she’s been talking to while on-site.

To me, this all reeks of a kind of a pathetically uninformed, meandering ‘what I did on my last field trip’ account of an unwitting accessory to Western intelligence.

I’m astounded, but no longer surprised, that this shitty piece of writing passed muster. There are no more editorial standards left; all there is—is piss-poor agit-prop (and in case you read German, here’s another one of her highly-praised pieces from Ukraine, entitled ‘In Ukraine, Patriotism is Blossoming’, Der Standard, 24 Aug. 2023).

So, here we are: more agit-prop, accompanied by increasingly weird conflation of that policy decision (‘Green New Deal’) that’s destroying European manufacturing and prosperity—all the while the flower of Ukraine’s youth has died and/or left.

The biggest story, though, is desperately buried: Ukraine’s population has fallen by a third since 2020.

Anyone who thinks that Kyiv is going to keep on doing what they’ve been doing in the past 3.5 years is deluding themselves. Lower population numbers equal drastically reduced tax receipts = the ability to service the debt. Combined with very low fertility rates (1.3 per woman), this doesn’t simply spell disaster in the medium-term.

The Economic Consequences of Peace in Ukraine

The day of reckoning isn’t far off as Ukraine already is technically in default of some of its obligations: as per Reuters, Mr. Zelenskyy may ‘suspend payments’ since July 2024—and now Kyiv is refusing to pay up.

Guess what will happen once Mr. Market notices™ that these foreign obligations are technically assets on the creditors’ books…