By Aris Roussinos
Friday, October 28, 2022
As the seasons change, the war in Ukraine has entered a
new phase. Following a series of major reverses the
Russians are digging in, in the hope that the autumn rains will bog
down any further Ukrainian counter-offensives, perhaps allowing time to train
and equip their newly-mobilised conscript army for a second push next spring.
In the meantime, Russia’s attention has shifted
towards knocking
out Ukraine’s electrical grid from the air. Over the past three weeks,
waves of cruise missile and Iranian Shahed drone strikes have
battered Ukraine’s power infrastructure, damaging or destroying around 40%
of its power network, leading to blackouts and outages across the country,
including western cities hitherto barely affected by the war. In
his nightly address last night from a blacked-out Kyiv, standing next
to a downed Shahed UAV, Zelensky asserted: “We are not afraid
of the dark. The darkest times for us are not without light, but without
freedom.”
But if the disruption of power supplies continues into
winter, it will affect civilian morale, as is no doubt intended. Urging
Ukrainians to limit their electricity consumption on
Wednesday, Zelensky stated that “Russian terrorists have created such
difficult conditions for our energy workers that no one in Europe has ever seen
or encountered” but “we need victory over Russia in the energy sphere as well.”
The coinciding of the new bombing campaign with the
appointment of the Russian Air Force general Sergey Surovikin,
who oversaw much of the brutal and successful aerial bombardment of rebel-held
Syrian cities following Russia’s 2015 intervention, has naturally led
to speculation that his appointment is an attempt to apply the “Syrian
playbook” to Ukraine.
Yet expert analysts urge caution: as
the Institute for the Study of War observed, all the
Russian commanders overseeing the Ukraine war so far have previously commanded
operations in Syria, using much the same methods. In any case:
Whoever was appointed as theatre
commander would have overseen the October 10 cruise missile strikes, which
Ukrainian intelligence reported had been planned as early as October 2 (and
which Surovikin certainly did not plan, prepare for, and conduct on the day of
his appointment).
- Institute
for the Study of War
If anything, the surprise is that Russia did not pursue
this aerial campaign at the beginning of the war. A “shock
and awe” campaign against civilian and dual-use infrastructure,
like American
bombing of Iraq’s power nodes in 2003, would ordinarily precede a
ground offensive. Perhaps the better analogy is with the 1999 NATO bombing
campaign against Yugoslavia, in which the
destruction of the electric grid only began after three months of
limited success striking military targets.
NATO spokesman Jamie Shea briefed
then that “the fact that lights went out across 70% of the country
shows that NATO has its finger on the light switch now… We can turn the power
off whenever we need to and whenever we want.” No doubt Putin, who frequently
cites NATO’s Kosovo intervention as
a precedent, is aiming to send a similar message. But the takeaway lesson
is surely that Russia has dialled back its war aims, even as the conflict’s
hardships affect a broader swathe of Ukraine’s civilian population.
Back in February, Putin ordered lightly-armed troops to
invade much of Ukraine, leaving the country’s infrastructure intact in the
seeming belief the war would end in days with a puppet government installed. In
destroying Ukraine’s power grid, Putin is signalling, perhaps unintentionally,
acceptance that his broadest ambitions will not be realised. Ukraine’s civilian
infrastructure is now a target precisely because the country will not become
part of Russia’s sphere of influence. The escalation of the bombing is in its
own way a quiet admission of defeat.
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