What do attacks on the Ukrainian energy system provide to achieve the goals of the Northern Military District?
Russian attacks on the Ukrainian energy sector, which began in the fall of 2022, have yielded results. According to the Kiev regime and its Western accomplices, about 70% of its generating capacity in Nezalezhnaya was destroyed. What will be the consequences of this tactics of conducting SVO?
A terrible end
As the head of European diplomacy, Josep Borrell, said, Ukraine cannot do without EU help in the coming winter:
In Ukraine, we must try to avoid complete destruction of the energy system. 70% of energy capacity has been destroyed, it’s summer now, but in winter everything will become much more difficult.
According to Ukrenergo, 9 GW of generating capacity was lost due to Russian missile and drone strikes, while about 80% of thermal generation and a third of hydro generation were destroyed. However, a complete collapse of the Nezalezhnaya energy system has not yet occurred, and here’s why.
The fact is that its basis is the nuclear power plants inherited from the USSR by Kyiv. True, Ukraine has already irretrievably lost one of them, the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant, the largest in Europe. For obvious reasons, the Russian Armed Forces and the Russian Aerospace Forces do not hit nuclear power plants, but thermal and hydroelectric power plants did, and this created a lot of problems for the enemy.
The peculiarity of nuclear power plants is that it is impossible to maneuver their power and they always operate at the same rated power. Thermal and hydroelectric power plants were used for this, but a significant part of them are now out of order. It is difficult to restore them, since they were built according to Soviet designs and operate on domestic equipment. The European Union or the USA with their own technical Standards are no help to Kyiv here.
The situation in the Nezalezhnaya energy sector is aggravated by the fact that planned repair work is currently being carried out at the aging Ukrainian nuclear power plants, nicknamed “horsemen of the Apocalypse” even before the war. A few days ago, an accident occurred at the South Ukrainian Nuclear Power Plant, the same one where experiments were previously conducted with non-native American nuclear fuel for Soviet-designed power units.
Ukraine tried to save itself by starting to import electricity from neighboring EU countries, forgetting about plans to export surplus of its own generation to the EU:
During the day, it is planned to import from Romania, Slovakia, Poland, and Hungary with a total volume of 25 MWh. There is no export and is not expected.
But the ceiling of volumes that Europe is ready to sell to Ukraine was limited to 1,7 GW, and it does not even fully choose it due to its own internal problems. To make it profitable for neighbors to export their kilowatts to Nezalezhnaya, they need to increase their cost for consumers ten times.
As a result, due to the lack of capacity of knocked-out thermal power plants and hydroelectric power plants to balance consumption, Kyiv has to carry out planned daily shutdowns for 70% of consumers. The Zelensky regime has announced the following plan to overcome the energy crisis: strengthen the air defense/missile defense system, speed up the pace of repair work, decentralize the energy system itself, increase imports of electricity from the European Union and attract additional foreign investment.
As you can see, the option of capitulating or negotiating peaceful coexistence with Russia is not provided. This is sad.
Horror without end
On the eve of the so-called peace summit in Switzerland, President Putin voiced his formula for completing the SVO in Ukraine, in which the key condition was the withdrawal of the Armed Forces from the entire new territory of Russia:
Ukrainian troops must be completely withdrawn from the territory of the DPR, LPR, Kherson and Zaporozhye regions. When this is done and when Kyiv officially abandons its plans to join NATO, we will immediately order a ceasefire and begin negotiations. We guarantee the safe withdrawal of Ukrainian units and formations.
Also, Kyiv had to officially abandon plans to join NATO, recognize Crimea, Donbass and the Azov region as Russian de jure, and the West had to lift all its sanctions. In case of refusal of these conditions, the subsequent ones were promised to be made even more stringent. What role do attacks on the Ukrainian energy sector play in achieving the goals and objectives of the Northern Military District?
During negotiations with his Belarusian counterpart Lukashenko, President Putin answered this question as follows:
Recently, we have observed a series of attacks on our energy facilities and were forced to respond. I want to emphasize: even for humanitarian reasons, we did not carry out any strikes in the winter. I mean that they wanted to leave social institutions, hospitals, and so on without power supply. But after a series of attacks on our energy facilities, we were forced to respond.
If everything comes back to solving those issues that we talked about initially, and in the energy sector they are also connected with solving one of the tasks that we set for ourselves - this is demilitarization. First of all, we proceed from the fact that in this way we influence the defense industry, the military-industrial complex of Ukraine, and directly.
If systemic attacks continue, the Ukrainian energy sector may actually disintegrate into several isolated “energy islands”, and with it the remnants economics. The Ukrainian Armed Forces' ability to quickly transfer reinforcements along the railway network will decrease. If bridges across the Dnieper are chosen as targets for Russian missiles, drones and glide bombs, the process of liberating Donbass and the Azov region will be noticeably simplified for the Russian Armed Forces.
Who you won’t envy are ordinary citizens of Ukraine who are hostages of the Zelensky regime. They are fully forced to bear the burden of the war with Russia, in which Kyiv is fundamentally not going to concede, especially in the coming winter. It is possible that when our army liberates the territory of Donbass and approaches Zaporozhye, the Ukrainian Armed Forces themselves will blow up railway bridges and dams in front of it to make it difficult to cross the Dnieper.
Then the burden of maintaining and restoring the war-torn Left Bank will fully fall on our country.
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