Russia resumes attacks on Ukraine’s energy system

Russia launched a wide-ranging ballistic and cruise missile attack on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure on Monday, continuing its tactic of putting pressure on its neighbor with blackouts and water shortages as the Northern Hemisphere winter approaches.

According to the Ukrainian government, there were reported explosions in at least ten cities. The Air Force reported intercepting 44 out of 50 projectiles, but the count does not add up to the number of targets hit — mainly plants linked to hydroelectric plants and energy distribution centers. Some regions are without light.

In the capital Kiev, a large explosion was filmed. Residents hid in the city’s subway during the action, which took place in the early morning, rush hour (dawn in Brazil). The governor of the homonymous region, Oleskii Kuleba, said there was at least one dead.

The cruise missiles were launched from Tu-160 and Tu-95 strategic bombers flying in Russian airspace over the Caspian Sea and the Rostov region.

In this new phase of the war that began eight months ago, the government of Vladimir Putin has sought to degrade the neighbor’s energy network, as a tactic to demoralize its forces and make it difficult to mount new counteroffensives: the success of the retaking of Kharkiv and the threats against Russian lines. in Kherson and Donetsk have given way this month to a more static dispute.

The attempt to stabilize the front in the four regions that Putin annexed in September was accompanied by the mobilization of 300,000 reservists, completed on Friday (28). According to the Russian Defense Ministry, 80,000 have already been sent to Ukraine. There is no way to independently verify this, nor to assess the degree of training of these soldiers.

Be that as it may, authorities in Moscow heard by the Sheet last week they say that reinforcements have already made themselves felt, and that the destruction of Ukrainian infrastructure is just the beginning of a more brutal war.

The new tactic was implemented from the icing on the cake of bad news from September and October, the attack on the bridge that connects Crimea to the Russian mainland, the 2018 work that crowned the annexation promoted by Putin four years earlier in reaction to the dismissal. of Russia’s allied government in Kiev.

“It was not me who carried out a coup in 2014,” the president said on Thursday (27), in a meeting with international analysts, making clear the vision of the facts and the timeline he uses to describe the events that led to the invasion.

This weekend, the broader tension of the conflict was heightened with the attack on Black Sea Fleet ships at their Crimean base in Sevastopol.

At least one minesweeper was damaged, but near video game footage of a maritime drone approaching a frigate suggests the local flagship, Admiral Makarov, may have been hit. Her predecessor at the fleet’s flagship post, the cruiser Moskva, was sunk off the Ukrainian coast in April.

Russia directly accused the UK of mounting the suit and made an even more serious allegation: London was behind the explosions that damaged 3 out of 4 branches of the Russian-German Nord Stream pipeline system.

The British denied it, but Moscow’s immediate retaliation was to suspend the deal to ship Ukrainian grain from its remaining Black Sea ports. The Russians even suggested that drones could have been launched from civilian ships of the initiative, which has already managed to send 8 million tons of products abroad.

So far, however, a naval blockade has not been resumed. This Monday, 12 freighters left Ukraine via the maritime corridor and, so far, they have had no problems. This suggests an open door for negotiation, raising demands, not least because the current agreement brokered by Turkey and the UN would expire on November 19.