the Gist View
Russia’s overnight launch of more than 450 drones and 45 missiles punched fresh holes in Ukraine’s grid, knocking Tsentrenergo’s output to “zero” and plunging Kyiv, Poltava and Kharkiv into rotating black-outs just as temperatures dip toward freezing. Three civilians died—two in Dnipro, one in Kharkiv—while water pumps now run on diesel generators in hard-hit cities such as Kremenchuk. (reuters.com)
Seen in context, Moscow has revived the 2022–23 playbook of winter energy terror precisely when Western fatigue is thickest and OPEC+ tightens oil supply. Ukraine’s power grid today has barely 55 % of its pre-invasion thermal capacity; each lost gigawatt forces Kyiv to import costlier EU electricity, eroding scarce foreign-exchange reserves even as IMF targets loom. Al-Jazeera and DW correspondents confirm damage across at least five regions, indicating a calibrated attempt to outpace recent Patriot and Mirage deployments. (aljazeera.com)
The strikes expose a contradiction at the heart of “deterrence by sanction”: Russia’s fossil-fuel revenues still finance Kalibr barrages faster than the West can refill Ukraine’s air-defense magazines. Unless G7 caps squeeze pipeline gas—long exempt from sanctions—Europe may end up underwriting the very outages it rushes to repair. As strategist Lykke Friis warns, “Energy security is now the truest stress test of solidarity.”
The Gist AI Editor
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