Russia attacking energy facilities

The war in Ukraine may appear to be a grinding stalemate, but there are shifts and there are inflections, those that may change the tide of a conflict whose result is more up for grabs than ever. And we’ve seen one of those inflections in the air war. This is an air strike. The Sky News Day and forensics team have verified and located. It’s on a power plant last month, and that was here in the middle of the country. But they’ve been lots of strikes all over the country, all on power plants in the east, as you might expect, near the front lines, but all the way through the country, even as far West as overhead, just 24 miles from the border with Poland. And the data backs up this shift of tactics. This shows recent attacks on energy systems you can see. It has really ramped up now. We have previously talked about Russia targeting energy to keep Ukraine in the cold during winter. But now we’re going into summer, we’re seeing a similar tempo, and it’s also doing more damage. An average of nearly 900,000 Ukrainian households without power on any given day here in March. That’s the highest in the war. These strikes are taking longer to repair. So why this shift from Russia? Why target energy infrastructure now, unlike earlier in the war when you sort of saw Russia attacking Ukrainian energy infrastructure as a way to perhaps make it more difficult for civilians to? Get heat and other resources in In the winter time. These Russian attacks on Ukrainian and infrastructure seem to be focused on undermining Ukraine’s economy and Ukraine’s ability to produce defense materials domestically. For Russia, that is also a window of opportunity. To continue pushing its frontline westward just shows the big picture. Two years ago, May 2022. This is now, and it might appear to show a stalemate. You’ve got the Russian controlled areas here in red, but actually if you look in the South and E, advances have been made in a slow. Grinding manner If we take it a bit closer, you may remember backward the city that fell in May 2023. Now the fighting has advanced just 7 miles away from there to chassis on this town there. Now this is much more important than Backman. It’s for would open up a route into central Ukraine and Russia is going for it. This is an attack on a residential complex which we verified. It shows just how much Russia wants this town. And indeed Ukrainian journalists say it was meant to be taken to celebrate Russia’s Victory Day held today. This strike also shows that it’s still under Ukrainian control. Ukraine needs artillery shells and it needs more air defense, but it is still hanging bitterly on.