Preliminary documented damage inflicted on Ukrtelecom by full-scale Russian aggression exceeds UAH 600 million, the company has lost 12% of network nodes due to occupation or destruction, the company's CEO Yuriy Kurmaz has said in an interview with Interfax-Ukraine.

"More than UAH 600 million is the damage that we preliminary assessed, documented and were able to digitize, so to speak. It's hard to make a more comprehensive assessment, especially for those facilities that are still located in the temporarily occupied territory," he said.

According to him, about 200 buildings were damaged and about 40 were completely destroyed.

The head of the company said that the destruction was especially severe in Kherson region. "They [Russian troops] destroyed or disabled everything they could, because they could not use our infrastructure to connect to the Russian fragment of the Internet line and to provide transport to the mobile services that they "brought" there. In retaliation or out of desperation, but our infrastructure there was very heavily damaged," the CEO said, describing the situation.

Kurmaz said that Ukrtelecom will demand compensation for this damage as part of a lawsuit filed by the company's shareholder and investor Rinat Akhmetov with the European Court of Human Rights, while the amount will be specified as new information about the damage becomes available.

The CEO said that the company did not apply for state assistance in restoring the infrastructure and relies only on its own funds.

According to him, Ukrtelecom received some support from foreign TV companies and vendors.

"British Telecom together with Cisco greatly helped us with equipment for the transport network; we received assistance from Orange Polska not only with equipment for data centers, but also with humanitarian aid, which we used for our social assistance centers in the western regions of Ukraine for the displaced families of our employees and not only," Kurmaz said.

He added that in the field of IT-infrastructure the company cooperates with Microsoft, Oracle, Dell, which, meeting our requests, provide preferential terms for using their software.

Ukrtelecom is the largest fixed-line operator in Ukraine. A significant part of its clients are government agencies, educational, administrative and medical institutions, emergency services.

Ukrtelecom's revenue in January-September 2022 amounted to UAH 3.35 billion, which is 15.7% less than in the same period of 2021. The net loss amounted to UAH 755.18 million versus a net profit of UAH 360.03 million in January-September 2021.