Ukrainian engineers scramble to keep mobile phones working
With Ukraine scrambling to keep communication lines open during the war, an army of engineers from the country's phone companies has mobilised to help the public and policymakers stay in touch during repeated Russian missile and drone strikes.
The engineers, who typically go unseen and unsung in peacetime, often work around the clock to maintain or restore phone service, sometimes braving minefields to do so.
After Russian strikes took out the electricity that cellphone towers usually run on, they revved up generators to keep the towers on.
“I know our guys — my colleagues — are very exhausted, but they're motivated by the fact that we are doing an important thing,” Yuriy Dugnist, an engineer with Ukrainian telecommunications company Kyivstar, said after crunching through 15 centimeters of fresh snow to reach a fenced-in mobile phone tower on the western fringe of Kyiv, the capital.
Dugrist and his co-workers offered a glimpse of their new daily routines, which involve using an app on their own phones to monitor which of the scores of phone towers in the capital area were receiving electricity, either during breaks from the controlled blackouts being used to conserve energy or from the generators that kick in to provide backup power.
One entry ominously read, in English, “Low Fuel.”
Stopping off at a service station before their rounds, the team members filled up eight 20-litre jerrycans with diesel fuel for a vast tank under a generator that relays power up a 50-metre cell tower in a suburban village that has had no electricity for days.
It's one of many Ukrainian towns that have had intermittent power, or none at all, in the wake of multiple rounds of devastating Russian strikes in recent weeks targeting the
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