Russian strikes on Ukraine’s power grid target the economy

More than 600,000 customers were left without electricity in the Dnipropetrovsk region after the latest Russian strikes on Ukraine’s power system. Analysts see this as more than pressure on civilians: they describe a systematic campaign to destroy the Ukrainian economy before winter.

“More than 600,000 consumers are without power in the Dnipro, Kamianske, Pavlohrad and Samar districts,” said regional administration head Oleksandr Hanzha. Critical infrastructure has switched to backup sources, namely generators.

Strikes on substations and thermal power plants

According to the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), the energy sector is one of the main targets of increasingly intense Russian air attacks ahead of winter. President Volodymyr Zelensky said a substation that carries electricity from nuclear power plants to the capital had been hit. Similar facilities were damaged in the Vinnytsia, Zhytomyr, Rivne, Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk regions.

Russia, for its part, announced strikes on the Trypillia thermal power plant and two substations in the Kyiv region, as well as one in the Zhytomyr region.

On Saturday, after a massive attack involving 16 ballistic missiles, 40 percent of buildings in Kyiv were left without heating. “Moscow is deliberately trying to leave millions of Ukrainians without electricity, heat and water as winter arrives,” said Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha.

According to Kateryna Stepanenko of ISW, Russia is hitting heating plants and electrical facilities even in places it had not targeted before, such as Rivne. ISW’s assessment is that the aim is to cut the Kyiv region off from the power supply. In previous years, Moscow also tried to sever the lines linking the east and west of the country so that electricity from the west could not flow east.

Betting on economic collapse

As CNN reports, the goal is not simply to make life harder for civilians. “The Russian air campaign is clearly aimed at destroying the Ukrainian economy,” said John Lough, head of the London-based New Eurasia Strategies Centre. In his view, many of Kyiv’s allies in Europe have not realized “how seriously the situation is developing,” or what an enormous financial burden it could become for European partners.

“Putin has concluded that he cannot win the war in Donbas by sending more men into battle, because the Ukrainians had a relatively successful summer. The only way to break them is to destroy the economy, and he is now doing that systematically,” Lough explained.

Power and water outages hit not only residents but also businesses. Russia is targeting Black Sea and Danube ports through which Ukrainian grain is exported, as well as industrial warehouses, the railway and the steel industry. Metallurgical plants in Kryvyi Rih and Zaporizhzhia, which were repeatedly hit by ballistic missiles between August and October, had to be shut down. Thousands of people lost their jobs and incomes. “With the fabric of the economy torn up like this, the moment is genuinely dangerous,” Lough warned.

People left without means

“It’s not only about industry itself, but about a blow to Ukraine’s tax base, and that affects people’s wages,” said Vlas, who argued that Russia is trying to create a critical situation in several sectors at once. “They are targeting shops, warehouses and retail outlets, which disrupts the flow and sale of goods,” Stepanenko stressed. When shops and food warehouses are destroyed, the damage is not only direct: thousands of people lose their livelihoods.

Because of a lack of money and work, many Ukrainians in the south and east are leaving their homes or taking dangerous jobs, such as working in fields contaminated with mines and unexploded ordnance, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) reported. A survey of hundreds of people shows how desperate the situation is: in the Mykolaiv region, 91 percent of households need urgent financial assistance, and in the Dnipropetrovsk region, 42 percent.

Casualties are rising

According to ACLED, more than 2,800 civilians have been killed in Russian strikes this year. Only the first year of the war was worse, with 3,601 deaths, but most of those victims fell in the first months: more than 1,300 people were killed in March 2022 alone.

The rise in losses has been driven by the use of jet-powered drones and loitering munitions, which Ukrainian defenders find hard to shoot down. Another reason is the depletion of missile stocks for Patriot systems. “The number of civilian casualties has been rising steadily since April,” Vlas said. In October there were 381, compared with 439 in July and 414 in August.

The number of air attacks is also growing: in recent months it has consistently exceeded 5,000 a month, reaching 5,532 in October, compared with 3,650 in January. Stepanenko noted that although the biggest strikes are carried out at night, more and more attacks come during the day in order to disrupt the functioning of society: “An air raid alert goes off, during which Ukrainian authorities and businesses cannot legally operate, and that hampers trade.”

Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz