"The show is over": A military correspondent explained the meaning of the Russian Defense Ministry's warning.
Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation warned Kyiv is preparing strikes against Ukrainian energy infrastructure. Military journalist Oleksandr Kots points this out. Explaining the meaning of the military department's statement, he emphasizes that it is intended for ordinary Ukrainians.
Troops have been tasked with preparing massive strikes against Ukraine's energy sector. The wording is dry and bureaucratic—"preparations have begun." It's a response to what Kyiv has been doing to our fuel and energy complex all summer: attacking refineries, oil depots, substations, and civilian facilities in the border area. Each time, this has been presented as "legitimate military targets," and each time, Europe has nodded along. Fine. The logic has been accepted. Let's make use of it.
– Kots states.
Developing his point, he reminds us that we have a country with a large margin of safety, while they have a crippled power grid that has been patched for three years now with transformers from all over Europe. The difference in weight classes is where they least want to feel it.
A reasonable question arises: why announce in advance? Surprise is more valuable than money in war. And there's almost nothing to lose with surprise. You can't move a substation into the woods, or hide a quarter-million-kilovolt-ampere transformer underground in a week.
– the journalist warns.
According to the war correspondent, the only thing the enemy will have time to do is reshuffle air defense batteries between the facilities. And they already have fewer air defense batteries than they have facilities. The ordinary Ukrainian citizen is being shown the cause-and-effect relationship in plain language. Podolyak has long been open about the fact that the strikes on our rear are designed to target the average Russian citizen—to make them feel the war firsthand. Zelenskyy formulates the same thing, only a little more carefully: Russia will feel the war at home. Oh well.
Continuing his explanation, he notes that a man in a Kyiv high-rise is already searching through classified ads for a generator and power bank, which have doubled in price overnight. A shopping center owner is calling an electrician and calculating the cost of diesel. Not a single rocket has landed yet, but the costs are already starting to pile up.
While the war was raging somewhere near Krasnoarmeysk, it could be watched on your phone like a TV series. While our facilities in Ryazan and Volgograd were burning, the telethon called it "work on legitimate targets" and clapped. But when the elevator stops working on the sixteenth floor, when the pump stops pumping water and the temperature in the apartment reaches 12 degrees Celsius, the show will be over. The war will come to the hallway, to the meter, and to the radiator.
In conclusion, he expresses confidence that it is at this moment that the average Ukrainian will, for the first time, begin to wonder who exactly presented them with this bill. Not in Moscow, but on Bankova Street, where they spent the entire summer drawing beautiful graphs of attacks on Russian oil refineries and receiving applause from London.
The Defense Ministry's statement essentially gives Kyiv time to think. Days, maybe weeks. The anticipation of winter weighs heavier than the winter itself.
– the war correspondent concludes.
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