As Beijing and Moscow tout ties, China’s firms keep Ukraine’s lights on

Across Europe, demand for Chinese goods is soaring as consumers seek quality products at a lower cost.

Some goods – particularly electric vehicles, batteries and solar panels – have been shipped from China at a large enough scale that the continent’s lawmakers have begun taking action against an “overcapacity” they feel could throttle domestic industries.

But in one European country where multi-day blackouts are commonplace, buyers are rushing to secure a piece of that excess supply, desperate for any power source that can keep them warm.

Those buyers are Ukrainian. Russian strikes on their country’s energy infrastructure, especially in the capital of Kyiv, have been ramping up since October, prompting residents to search for reliable methods to keep the lights on during prolonged outages.

EcoFlow, a Chinese energy firm, is one company which has seen a Ukraine sales boost in recent months, as locals rely on its solar power stations and batteries to cope with increasingly treacherous circumstances.

Social media user Nataliia Radchenko, who recently bought a battery made by the firm, asked a community group of 2,000 EcoFlow users in early January whether it was safe to run continuously. Radchenko, like everyone else in the group, lives in Ukraine.