Energy infrastructure
Sigh
Russia is targeting Ukrainian energy infrastructure.
This is belated but very smart and very dangerous.
But in cribbing Ministry of Defence, ISW and Quincy world:
Its been degraded. And the Russians still have their Kalibrs and a certain big nuclear plant they can shutdown safely or catastrophically.
The Guardian:
Quote:
Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskiy said Russia had launched a “massive attack” on Ukraine, with some strikes reported on energy infrastructure that resulted in power outages across the country.
More than a dozen Russian missiles pounded energy facilities and other infrastructure across Ukraine on Saturday, the Ukrainian air force said, with strikes causing blackouts in parts of different regions.
Targeting energy infrastructure is a staple of war that becomes more and more important with each major war. Its a difficult question of law to decide whether energy infrastructure is a legitimate target. Nobody in the Allied bombing commands in World War Two would have doubted that destroying energy infrastructure was a legitimate and completely legal act, even looking back it looks much more civilised and humane than night bombing cities.
That said targeting infrastructure means freezing homes and people, hospitals without power, food rotting and without transport , water can’t be pumped or cleaned - it does translate to civilian deaths. An army can function without grid power as armies have always proved. But civilians can’t, without regressing to daily starvation and hunger.
Khmelnytskiy, which was home to some 275,000 people before the war, was left with no electricity, shortly after local media reported several loud explosions on Saturday, regional officials said.
Uman, which had some 100,000 residents before the war, was also plunged into darkness after a rocket hit a nearby power station.
In Lutsk, a city of 215,000, electricity had been partially knocked out after Russian missiles slammed into local energy facilities, according to local officials.
Authorities in Khmelnytskiy and Lutsk urged residents to store water, “in case it’s also gone.” - Voice of America
I have no time for pundits who crib from tertiary sources. Nick Budd knows the situation on the ground because he talks with Ukrainians who are starving, freezing and without power. He doesn’t need to read Wavell Room MacBook written Monday morning reports cribbed from the Guardian.
Energy is Putin’s weapon. Both providing it and denying it.
Next up, the pundits will discover artillery as a weapon of physical and national genocide.
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