Putin could be ‘signing suicide note’ says Bolton
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Russian President Vladimir Putin’s brutal frenzy of missile attacks this week “completely failed” to achieve the dictator’s objective of taking down the entire country’s power supply by targeting critical energy infrastructure as Russia used “everything it could” in the brutal offensive, Express.co.uk has been told. This week, Putin ordered missiles to rain down on at least 10 cities across Ukraine, including the capital Kiev, amid the onslaught of his neighbouring country. He attempted to justify the missile strikes this week as revenge for the explosion on the bridge linking Russia to the Crimean Peninsula, a move that Ukraine denies being involved in.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Putin was specifically targeting energy infrastructure, and according to the country’s Energy Minister Herman Halushchenko, missiles did hit around 30 percent in two days.
However, according to Mark Savchuk, a Kiev local and an expert in the energy sector with a postgraduate degree from the London School of Business and Finance, this fell far short of what Putin was hoping to achieve.
He told Express.co.uk: “They [Russia] were aiming at crushing and taking down certain parts of the country completely, meaning that it wanted several regions to have no electricity whatsoever. They did not succeed at that at all and all critical repairs were done by the end of the day.”
And luckily, Russia appeared to run out of steam the following day, which proved vital for the invaded nation as it scrambled to repair the damages.
Mr Savchuk said: “The next day, if they followed up with exactly the same attacks, they probably would have succeeded because we would not have been able to repair that amount of equipment. What you saw was the maximum they could do.
“Firing those missiles requires an insane amount of coordination. They have to send out airplanes, completely resupply and restock submarines and ships that fire calibre missiles, and they have to get the surface launch platforms of their rockets as close to the border as possible and launch everything at the same time. It is incredibly difficult and astronomically expensive.
“What we saw was the maximum they can do. The number of rockets actually exceeded the number of rockets fired on February 24 (when Russia first invaded). It was the most they can manage in a day. While they launched more the next day, there was a sharp drop in launching capabilities.”
However, Mr Savchuk warned that Ukraine is not completely out of the mud just yet as Putin will likely go back to the drawing board and re-attempt a missile barrage at a later date.
He said: “Right now, they will come back to their supplies and stocks, and basically resupply all their launching platforms, but it takes a huge amount of time because all these rockets have to be tested, lots of them fail. Actually several of the rockets simply landed in fields simply because their navigation system was f****d.
“For them, to launch 100 missiles a day, their ability to launch this amount of rockets takes a huge amount of work. This is why they did not repeat the attacks the next day.”
While the missiles may not have caused the kind of damage the Russian President was hoping for, it still left millions without power for extended periods in several cities, while citizens have also been urged to limit their energy consumption. Mr Zelensky has also warned that more blackouts could be on the way, despite power having been restored to a large bulk of the population.
Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said on Wednesday: “In their sick imagination, Ukrainians sitting for several hours without electricity is a victory. They think that this way they will force us to surrender. This will not happen.”
In fact, the Ukrainian government has said that Russian missiles and drones struck Ukrainian targets 128 times over three days this week, hitting 28 energy installations. But the Ukrainians were quick to act.
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Mr Savchuk told Express.co.uk: “Russia specifically targeted places responsible for transferring big amounts of energy from one place to another. It seems as though they were consulting energy specialists to make the target list because if you want to bring electricity systems down, you would have gone for these targets.
“We had large areas without electricity for one day, but we have managed to repair critical stuff pretty quickly. By the end of the day, we went from millions of people without power to hundreds of thousands of people without electricity.
“The next day, we had something called scheduled blackouts to balance energy the system. Including myself, various parts of the country…were taken off-grid for balance.
“Today, Kiev is absolutely fine. I am using electricity as I normally would, but the Government is asking people to economize their consumption. The country on a whole did all the repairs within two days, but we do still have some parts of Lviv and Kharkiv still without electricity, although repairs are being made as we speak and within a few days everything will be fine.”
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