Europe’s new grid of resilience

Thirty kilometers west of Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave, Lithuania is preparing to build an electrical substation unlike anything it has constructed before. Spread across 35 hectares near Gižai, the facility will be surrounded by fencing strong enough to withstand an explosives-laden truck, sensors designed to detect tunneling beneath its perimeter, and reinforced-concrete structures protecting transformers from attack drones. Critical equipment will also be duplicated, so the substation can continue operating if part of the system is damaged.

 Such precautions have brought the military directly into the planning process: Lithuania’s armed forces have advised engineers on the facility’s defenses, while the additional security measures have already added at least €48 million to the projected cost.

Gižai is, technically, a piece of civilian electricity infrastructure. Yet almost every element of its design begins with a distinctly military question: what happens when someone tries to destroy it?

Ukraine rewrites the infrastructure rulebook

The answer was already being written across Ukraine. From the autumn of 2022, Russia increasingly targeted the infrastructure that generated and carried electricity across the country, turning power plants, transformers, and substations into recurring targets. Before the full-scale invasion, Ukraine had around 38 gigawatts of available dispatchable generation capacity. Occupation, destruction, and damage cut that figure in half during the first year of war and after another concentrated wave of attacks in the spring of 2024, it fell to roughly 12 gigawatts. By then, around half of the country's large network substations had also been damaged.

The attacks exposed a vulnerability extending beyond electricity generation itself. Even when a power plant survives, damage to the substations and transmission infrastructure surrounding it can prevent its electricity from reaching the grid. The problem became particularly acute around Ukraine's remaining nuclear plants, where damaged substations could interrupt their connection to consumers.

By 2026, Russia was increasingly extending the campaign to smaller nodes across the network. According to the Centre for Information Resilience, of 270 verified strikes on Ukrainian energy infrastructure between October 2025 and April 2026, 58 percent targeted smaller substations, nearly twice the share recorded during the same period a year earlier.

Ukraine consequently began changing not only how it repaired its energy system, but how that system was organized. Generation became more distributed, critical facilities were physically hardened, mobile generators and underground control systems were introduced, and operators increasingly standardized and stockpiled difficult-to-replace equipment. The International Energy Agency has repeatedly presented these measures as lessons in resilience for other countries facing physical attacks, cyberattacks or major infrastructure failures.

Fortifying Europe’s eastern grid

Ukraine's experience is now being translated into infrastructure policy along Europe's eastern flank. On 9 February 2025, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania synchronized with the continental European grid and permanently disconnected their remaining electricity links with Russia and Belarus. More than €1.2 billion in EU funding supported the synchronization, with Poland providing the physical connection between the Baltic system and the rest of continental Europe.

Securing the newly independent system soon became a separate priority. In September 2025, Poland and the three Baltic states submitted a €382 million grid-security plan to the European Union, requesting funding for half its cost. Proposed measures included concrete bunkers around key equipment, anti-drone nets and reserves of components that can take months to manufacture or replace.

In Lithuania, the approach was already visible at the Neris substation, which supplies Vilnius and lies around 20 kilometers from the Belarusian border. Concrete defenses were installed around essential equipment and scheduled for explosives testing at a military range. Lithuania said it intended to spend €150 million strengthening its electricity system, while Ukraine's grid operator was advising its engineers on protective measures.

Estonia was moving in the same direction by 2026. Following a drone incident at the Auvere power plant near the Russian border, grid operator Elering announced plans to reinforce several substations, including with concrete shielding around transformers. The company is expected to spend €220 million over four years on stronger facilities and larger reserves of replacement components.

Beyond the grid

The same logic is extending beyond electricity. Modern armies depend on civilian transport systems to move personnel, ammunition and heavy equipment, making roads, railways, bridges and ports part of wartime planning. Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the European Union accelerated investment in military mobility. Funding rounds in 2022 and 2023 allocated around €1.42 billion to 73 dual-use transport projects.

Those projects represent only the beginning. European governments and the EU Military Staff have identified around 500 bottlenecks along priority military-mobility corridors, including bridges unable to support heavy vehicles, tunnels requiring enlargement, incompatible railway systems and ports or airports lacking sufficient capacity. For the 2028–2034 budget period, the European Commission has proposed €17.65 billion for military mobility, roughly ten times the funding available under the current framework.

The same concern applies to the networks carrying information. Submarine cables handle around 99 percent of intercontinental internet traffic, yet their length makes comprehensive physical defense impossible. Following a series of cable disruptions in European waters, the EU has placed greater emphasis on alternative routes, surveillance and rapid repair.

In February 2026, the European Commission allocated €347 million to strategic submarine-cable projects, including €20 million for modular repair equipment that can be positioned at ports and shipyards to restore damaged connections more quickly. NATO has pursued a parallel approach through Baltic Sentry, launched in January 2025 to monitor infrastructure in the Baltic Sea using ships, patrol aircraft and naval drones.

The economics of survivability

There is, however, a limit to how much infrastructure can be physically fortified. Europe's electricity networks alone contain thousands of geographically dispersed substations, before roads, railways, ports and communications networks are taken into account.

In September 2026, E.ON, one of Europe's largest electric utilities and energy companies, argued that protecting every individual site would be prohibitively expensive. Operators therefore must prepare for the possibility that some attacks will succeed rather than assume all can be prevented.

The wider challenge is ensuring that the system can continue operating even after individual sites have been damaged or lost. Physical protection remains important for the most critical facilities, but it is increasingly combined with alternative routes, spare capacity, reserves of difficult-to-replace components and the ability to restore damaged systems quickly. Estonia's Elering has described its own approach in similar terms, combining physical protection with larger reserves and faster restoration because a network extending across land, air and sea can never be completely secured.

The principle is also being embedded in European policy. The EU's Critical Entities Resilience framework now covers 11 sectors, including energy, transport, digital infrastructure, water and banking. Guidance issued in July 2026 calls for measures ranging from physical protection against drone and hybrid threats to mitigating disruptions and restoring essential services.

What began in Ukraine as an urgent response to destruction is increasingly being incorporated into European infrastructure before a crisis begins. Across sectors, civilian networks are being designed with disruption, attack and military requirements increasingly in mind. The objective is resilience under attack: a system capable of absorbing damage without allowing the loss of a single node to disrupt the whole.