With the nights quickly approaching as winter approaches, the lights are going out across Ukraine.
This week, Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk even warned citizens who fled the country when Russia invaded not to return home this winter, amid blackouts caused by power grid strikes.
“We need to survive this winter,” she said, adding that “[se as pessoas voltarem] the power grid can fail”.
Electricity rationing has become the dark new reality of the war as Russia seeks to destroy Ukraine’s economic capacity and force its leaders to the negotiating table.
Russia has attacked Ukraine’s critical infrastructure with a barrage of missiles and drone attacks in recent weeks – 30% of the country’s power plants have been destroyed, second President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Your energy minister warned that Ukraine may need to import electricity to survive the winter. Until recently, Ukraine exported electricity to the European Union (EU) market.
increasing the pressure
The poor performance of the Russian army on the battlefield, especially in recent months, has caused President Vladimir Putin and his generals to change tactics. As Ukrainian forces continue their advance to recapture the strategically important city of Kherson, the Russian military campaign has shifted to depriving civilians of electricity and heat.
As Ukrainians stock up on candles and firewood in preparation for power outages in winter temperatures that regularly drop below -20 degrees Celsius, Western leaders are having to consider what they can do to prevent Putin from targeting Ukrainian civilians and creating a humanitarian disaster. .
For European countries, there is real concern that the devastation of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure could bring the economy to its knees and dramatically increase the number of refugees heading west. An estimated 8 million Ukrainians fled to EU countries to escape the war, according to Schengen Visa data.
Putin is increasingly having to fight the war by new asymmetrical means because the underperforming Russian army risks losing on the battlefield if it becomes even more demoralized. The spectacular withdrawal of forces deployed in northeastern Ukraine in September was an indicator of the fragility of the Russian military.
On the other hand, the Ukrainian army continues to show greater resilience than the Kremlin expected. Western countries provided enough equipment and training to mount a serious counteroffensive and threaten to retake all territory captured since the full-scale invasion began in February.
Russia’s recent deployment of some 300,000 troops appears chaotic with reports that some were sent to the front without proper equipment or any form of retraining. These boosts will quickly become a liability rather than an asset if they are not motivated to fight.
For the Russian population, the initial mobilization means that the conflict in Ukraine is no longer an abstraction seen on television in the form of a “special military operation”, as Putin continues to call it. Rather, it is a war in which ordinary Russians are expected to die for reasons that are neither clear nor convincing.
Energy as a weapon of war
Moscow’s move to power plants is a clear violation of the international humanitarian law. Its aim is to inflict suffering on the civilian population and persuade Ukrainians that the price of continuing to fight is too high.
In the first months of the war, Russian missile attacks destroyed the biggest oil refinery Ukraine and many of its fuel storage facilities. The objective was to prevent the Ukrainian army from moving their vehicles. Despite the initial disruption that led to diesel and gasoline shortages in Kiev and other major cities, Ukraine has found alternative supplies from several EU countries that have so far held firm.
At the same time, Putin’s efforts to use gas as a weapon to persuade Ukraine’s European allies to stop supporting the war effort have failed, despite the enormous costs of subsidizing expensive alternatives to Gazprom’s supplies.
Fundamentally, Germany, the biggest European economy that imported 55% of its gas from Russia before the war, now has enough gas stored from other sources to get through the winter without major interruptions.
How the West should respond
To counter Putin’s latest escalation, European governments need to be ready to accept more refugees in the short term. At the same time, NATO countries must provide more weaponry to bolster Ukraine’s air defenses, as well as provide the resources to help Ukrainian engineers repair damage to power plants.
Putin is in a desperate race against time. The longer the war lasts, the greater the risk that Russia’s economic and human losses will weaken its grip on power. Support for the war is waning and unprecedented Western sanctions are increasingly taking their toll.
China and India, Russia’s most important allies, also expressed concern with Putin’s actions.
As Moscow tries to intimidate the West with the possibility of deploying a nuclear weapon in Ukraine, it has chosen a conventional strategy to try to reverse its fortunes on the battlefield.
So far, Ukraine has handled the economic effects of the war well. Basic services, including transport and telecommunications, continued, and despite a 30% devaluation, the currency did not collapse.
However, the country’s budget deficit is increasing and is expected to reach US$40 billion by the end of the year, equivalent to 30-40% of GDP.
With Russia focused on destroying the energy sector, Ukraine’s need for macrofinancial support from its Western allies could grow dramatically.
The real test of Western engagement with Ukraine is about to happen. For Ukraine to win this war, Western governments will need to dig much deeper and provide the country with the military and financial resources it needs to keep fighting.
Source: CNN Brasil
I’m James Harper, a highly experienced and accomplished news writer for World Stock Market. I have been writing in the Politics section of the website for over five years, providing readers with up-to-date and insightful information about current events in politics. My work is widely read and respected by many industry professionals as well as laymen.
