Russia intensified its air strikes in Ukrainian cities as part of a deliberate strategy that cripples the country’s energy system and demoralizes its population after the summer offensive failed to obtain traction.
As the winter approach, Russian missiles and drones launched in Kiev in Kiev soon Friday reminiscent of a large disturbance of strength in the capital in the first full winter of the war, in 2022-2023. The destruction and outages in other regions across the War Physical Nation spread when the air defense tried down hundreds of projectiles in the large territory of Ukraine.
Each party took on the pounding of the other’s energy infrastructure, with Ukraine focused on its strikes on refineries – some of them deep on Russian territory – in an effort to disrupt Moscow’s energy trade and bring war, well to their fourth year, closer to home.
This year, President Vladimir Putin’s ground offensive failed to bring the Kremlin closer to its war targets, including a struggle full of control over the Eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk – and far from the ambition to demilitarize Ukraine and overthrow its government.
“They can do nothing on the battlefield, so they are directly attacking energy,” said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenka to journalists in Kiev on Friday. “This is happening today.”
The breakthroughs on the battlefield became more difficult, because the spread of drones has expanded the front line to a wide killed zone, where soldiers can easily fall to unmanned air vehicles and precise artillery strikes.
Despite the fact that she has poured new units and weapons into the fight, Russia has only marginally accelerated the pace of its offensive since May. This year, Moscow forces reached approximately half of the total territory of Ukraine. According to Deepstate data, it is roughly the same as in 2024.
Russia has tried to make progress on Earth, and since August, when US President Donald Trump hosted Putin on Alaska, in what turned out to be an unsuccessful effort to end the fight.
Meanwhile, Ukrainian drones attacks on Russian oil refineries reduced raw processing, which made Moscow to send oil abroad for refining. Zelenskiy told reporters this week that the lack of gasoline in Russia was up to 20% of needs, a number that Moscow could not independently verify or confirm.
The Kremlin strategy is not new. However, Russian war planners have now determined that they have a free hand that would ravaged the Ukrainian gas infrastructure after Kiev closed the gas gas gas gas into Europe.
It was a quiet understanding in advance not to focus on gas infrastructure, while Russian fuel was drawn to Europe, people said that the closed doors were conditions for anonymity. At present, there are no market forces to force Moscow to save the Ukrainian gas infrastructure, they said.
Gazprom PJSC no longer sees Europe as a market and has turned focusing on China and other Asian countries.
Russia counts that the destruction of Ukraine’s energy devices will speed up the end of the conflict, people said, and described that it was like a form of forced peace. Europe could also be under pressure, because in addition to its own supplies, it will have to provide gas supplies to Ukraine.
The strategy brought some results. According to people with knowledge of this matter, the recent Russian packaging focused on Charkiv and Poltava regions in Northern Ukraine won about 60% of the country’s gas production. This is likely to force the country to spend EUR 1.9 billion on fuel imports to survive the winter, they said.
The largest private energy producer of Ukraine Dtek said on Friday that its thermal power plants had been hit for the third time in less than a week, thus getting the number of attacks on its facility from the beginning of the invasion in February 2022 to more than 200.
The interest in Kiev and among the Allies is that attacks do not interfere with without the US to put significant pressure on Russia, according to people who are familiar with thinking in European capitals.
Trump repeatedly threatened to hit Russia with significant sanctions, criticizing the bomber campaign – and said he was disappointed with Putin. But so far there has been little consequences.
The US hovered the opportunity to provide Ukraine with Tomahawk missiles with a long range, one of the most advanced weapons in its arsenal. For a long time, Kyiv has been asking for more robust air defense and longer reach to hit military targets in Russia.
Putin rejected this threat on Friday as “bluff”. Russia will strengthen its air defense – and will soon exhibit new weapons, he told the leaders of several former Soviet republics in Tajikistan Dushanbe.
Meanwhile, the latest package of European Union sanctions is stopped by Austria and Slovakia. The discussion of the use of frozen Russian assets to finance the military needs of Ukraine has been months since the resolution.
The next weeks, as the winter is coming, will be crucial, people said.
A group of seven nations are working on a set of measures, including restrictions on Russian oil companies and sanctions on third -country companies that allow energy trade in Moscow.
The ministers will continue discussions in Washington next week on the outskirts of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings. The provision of multiple air defense systems will be the main topic of the meeting held next week in the USA delegations of the highest government officials of Ukraine, Zelenka said on Friday.
EU leaders are to meet in Brussels at the summit at the end of this month, where there will be high sanctions and Russian assets.
The Allies of Ukraine have repeatedly stated that it is essential to starve Russia from oil income that Moscow needs to finance its war, although putting the objective into practice has proven to be a challenge – and this goal is mostly monitored by Kiev.
With the help of Albert Naredelli, Aliakssandr Kudrytski, Alex Kokcharov and Olesia Safron.
This article was generated from an automated news agency without text modifications.
(Tagstotranslate) Russia
