Yuri Lapaiev
Ahead of winter, Russia launched another campaign of combined air strikes on Ukraine’s critical infrastructure, including energy, gas production, and railway facilities.
Russia is continually upgrading its missiles and strike drones, thereby enhancing the effectiveness of its air attacks. Several Ukrainian cities have already been severely affected by this, and in some areas, the situation is critical.
Drones have become a key element of the attack, while Ukraine is actively developing interceptor drones as an effective and inexpensive means of countering massive UAV attacks by Russia.
Long-range weapons, both domestic and, potentially, U.S.-supplied Tomahawk cruise missiles, could become a powerful means of deterrence or retaliation.
On the night of October 10, the Russian army launched a combined air strike on Ukraine. In total, the Ukrainian Air Force detected 497 air attack units, comprising 32 missiles (both ballistic and cruise) and 465 unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) of various types (Telegram/@ComAFUA, October 10). Russia’s focus was on degrading critical infrastructure, primarily energy facilities. Damage to the Kyiv Thermal Power Plant (TPP-6) left several districts in Kyiv and the Kyiv oblast without power. Additionally, problems with electricity, gas, and water supplies were reported in the Zaporizhzhia, Sumy, Poltava, and Dnipropetrovsk oblasts (BBC Ukraine, October 10).
On October 7, during a meeting with the ambassadors of the Group of Seven (G7) countries, Ukrainian Energy Minister Svitlana Grinchuk stated that Russian troops had carried out 26 separate strikes on Ukrainian energy facilities in one day (Ministry of Energy of Ukraine, October 7). Later that evening, Russia attacked the DTEK thermal power plant, one of Ukraine’s largest energy companies. According to the company, two power engineers were injured, and the attack caused significant damage to the plant’s equipment. After the air strike ended, energy engineers quickly began to repair the damage (DTEK, October 8). Due to Russian strikes, more than half of Ukrainian natural gas facilities were destroyed, significantly decreasing gas production (Bloomberg; The Kyiv Independent, October 9). On October 16, the Russian army launched another combined strike on a gas production facility in the Poltava region. Due to the attack, the company was forced to suspend operations (Telegram/@dtek_ua, October 16).
No comments:
Post a Comment