By Daria Zhukauskaite
Late on Friday, October 30, a power cut hit parts of the city of Kaliningrad and, by residents’ reports, at least six other towns in the oblast (Guryevsk, Svetlogorsk, Pionersky, Yantarny, Gvardeysk and Bagrationovsk), and also disrupted mobile internet, after emergency automation shut down part of the region’s largest power plant, the CHP-2 combined heat and power station, though officials published no count of affected areas or people.
The regional government said power was fully restored within an hour, but Fontanka reported several hours without light and residents described cuts of up to several hours, as well as water and heating problems; no exact longest duration has been published.
Local outlets covered it in a flat, procedural way, mostly relaying statements from the government and the grid operator Rosseti Yantar, which denied any faults on its own network.
Officials haven’t said what triggered the shutdown, so this can’t be proved, but one possible explanation is “island mode”: since the Baltic states left the shared BRELL grid (Belarus, Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) in February 2025, Kaliningrad has had to generate all its own power, with about 47% of its installed capacity at CHP-2, by The Insider’s calculation. On a grid this small, losing a large generator could make the frequency, which must stay stable for the system to work, drop before other plants ramp up, forcing automatic limits on consumers.
In July 2025, power engineers reported a brief frequency drop and limits on consumer power after generators tripped at a different plant, Pregolskaya. Isolation could also help explain why a whole CHP-2 unit tripped in 2017 without any consumer outage, while cross-border flows covered the shortfall, yet shutdowns of part of the plant’s equipment in June and now October left homes in the dark. The link isn’t clear-cut, however, as failures involving CHP-2 also caused major outages while the region was still connected, in 2011 and 2013.
Sanctions may be an added strain at CHP-2 itself, whose GTE-160 gas turbines are Siemens-derived: the EU’s export ban now covers gas turbines and their parts, Siemens Energy sold its stake in its Russian turbine venture to Inter RAO, the plant’s owner, and that venture’s first locally made inner casing is intended for Unit 2’s overhaul, though nothing yet links this to the outage.
Nothing so far points to sabotage, though it can’t be excluded while the trigger remains unexplained. No official or media report found links the outage to an attack, and the Kyiv Independent, which reported possible drone activity in Ufa the same night, found no confirmed connection between the incidents. The pattern also looks more like a recurring technical weakness: emergency automation at CHP-2 cut part of its equipment in the same way in June, and supply was restored within about three hours, with no reports of physical damage at the plant.
Daria Zhukauskaite is BISC’s Kaliningrad 2050 research associate. She grew up shaped by Eastern Europe’s fault lines. A recent Harvard graduate, she has researched wealth inequality, documented Russian military strategy in Ukraine, and developed novel computational methodology to analyse Kremlin disinformation. She has also translated Stanislav Shushkevich’s autobiography and sourced investment opportunities across CEE for Western investors — all rooted in a single conviction: that democracy is worth fighting for, and that Ukraine must win.
All opinions expressed are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Baltic International Security Centre (BISC). BISC maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.