Black-start plans are written for a system that tripped, not a system that was hunted. If the units that can restart themselves, or the lines that would energize the next plant, are the ones with holes in them, the ladder is gone.

The ladder is the plan in plain language. A unit that can come up with no power from outside energizes a line. That line lets the next plant start. The next plant picks up load. Each step assumes the one before it is still there. A drill that climbs those steps is a real drill. It is not a drill of the first steps being destroyed while the climb is going on.

Peacetime black start is already a hard problem when the plants are intact. Operators rehearse a system that tripped, or that was taken down to practice the trip. The wartime difference is that the units which can restart themselves, and the lines between them, may be the ones that were hit. If they are gone, the rest of the plan is a diagram of machines no one can reach.

Ukraine’s experience, as the IEA has framed it, is repeated damage during the repair. A storm lets you rebuild in sequence. A war lets the sequence be interrupted.

A storm does its damage and then stops. Crews can move from the plants that can start toward the plants that cannot. A war does not offer that pause. The unit brought back can be the unit hit next. Sequence is an assumption the weather allows and a campaign does not have to allow.

Operators in peacetime can still ask a useful question: which black-start path has no second route? That answer is unclassified in spirit even when the diagram is not.

Readers will not see the diagram, and they do not need to. A black-start path with no second route is a single story. If that path is the one with the holes, there is no other story behind it. The public version of the question is whether a tripped grid and a missing restart path are being described as the same event. They are not the same event.