By Rostyslav Averchuk
Lviv (EFE).- Although the temporary ceasefire on attacks against the energy system appears to be holding, Russia continues bombing other facilities, while Ukrainians experience a new wave of extreme cold amid widespread power cuts and are skeptical about Moscow’s intentions.
“I don’t feel this ceasefire. Shaheds keep attacking,” Yevgenia Lebedeva, a psychologist from the major industrial city of Zaporizhia, located some 20 km (12 miles) away from the frontline in the south of Ukraine, told EFE.
Despite the truce, Lebedeva has kept hearing loud explosions as Russia launched over 1000 attacks by different kinds of drones, artillery, and aviation against the eponymous region since Friday morning, as the offensive against the frontline and border areas continued unabated.
Energy system suffers amid the cold
Even though no attacks on the energy infrastructure have been reported since the night between Thursday and Friday, the heavily damaged system suffers under the strain of rapidly falling temperatures.
After hovering around zero for a week, temperatures fell to minus 15 in Kyiv, where hundreds of multi-apartment buildings remained without access to heating as of Saturday morning due to the impact of earlier Russian strikes on critical infrastructure.
On Saturday afternoon, a breakdown of a high-voltage line connecting the center and west of Ukraine prompted nuclear power plants to urgently decrease generation, resulting in a complete blackout across much of the country.
Despite Energy Minister Denys Shmyhal’s assurances that the situation would improve within hours, the blackout led to the temporary suspension of metro services in Kyiv and Kharkiv, as well as the interruption of water and heating supply across the capital.
Although the situation has been better in western Ukraine, where most of the existing electricity generation is concentrated, the city authorities in Lviv have urged residents to prepare for the worst-case scenario.
With temperatures expected to fall even further, to minus 28 degrees on Monday, Russia can use it to strike critical infrastructure once again, Mayor Andriy Sadovyi underlined.
He urged residents to stock up on basic food, drinking water, and medicine, and to ensure that elderly or ill neighbors are not left alone.
Dozens of city-owned buildings, equipped with electricity generators and firewood stoves, will be ready to welcome locals in case they have no heating and electricity at home.
Businesses and critical infrastructure need to equip their electricity generators with a special kind of diesel to avoid breakdowns during the record cold, “Yasno,” a major electricity supplier, warned.
Preparing for new attacks
Few in Ukraine see the temporary absence of strikes against the energy system as a sign Russia is willing to change its stance on Ukraine.
By agreeing to halt the strikes until Sunday, Russia seeks to create the image of a “peacemaker” and only increase pressure on Ukraine to agree to Moscow’s ultimatums, Volodymyr Omelchenko, expert at Kyiv’s Razumkov Center, warned on the eve of the next round of talks in the UAE.
“If the Ukrainian authorities do not agree (to Russian demands), they will be accused of belligerence and subsequent casualties, and attacks on the energy sector will resume,” he wrote.
“New problems” await Ukrainians “next week,” Chair of Russia’s parliament, Viacheslav Volodin, warned on Friday, noting that Russian deputies “insist” on the application of “a more powerful ‘weapon of revenge.’”
A brief pause in strikes against the energy system is “nothing new,” political analyst Vitaliy Portnikov also warned, noting that Russia has routinely used such breaks to amass the amount of drones and missiles needed to overwhelm Ukraine’s air defenses.
Russia may also benefit from the pause in Ukraine’s drone strikes against its oil infrastructure as Moscow seeks to prevent the unraveling of its economy and internal social stability, Portnikov argued in his YouTube channel. EFE
ra/dgp
