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Ukraine War Updates: Russian Missile Strikes Leave Millions Without Power, Water

Ukraine War Updates: Russian Missile Strikes Leave Millions Without Power, Water

“Millions of people were still in the dark after the most devastating Russian air strikes of the war.”

After recent Russian retreats on the battlefield, Moscow has intensified air and missile strikes on Ukraine’s critical infrastructure.

The week-long Russian aerial assault has left millions of Ukrainians without basic amenities. “Tens of millions of Ukrainian citizens were left without power after Russian missile strikes damaged critical infrastructure in areas affecting areas such as Kyiv, Kherson and Lviv,” Sky News UK reported Friday.

The Associated Press reported the devastation caused by the Russian strikes:

A salvo of missiles struck the recently liberated city of Kherson for the second day Friday in a marked escalation of attacks since Russia withdrew from the city two weeks ago following an eight-month occupation. It comes as Russia has stepped up bombardment of Ukraine’s power grid and other critical civilian infrastructure in a bid to tighten the screw on Kyiv. Officials estimate that around 50% of Ukraine’s energy facilities have been damaged in the recent strikes. (…)

Scores of people were injured in the strikes that hit residential and commercial buildings, lighting some on fire, blowing ash into the air and littering the streets with shattered glass. The attacks wrought destruction on some residential neighborhoods not previously hit in the war that has just entered its tenth month.

Despite the Ukrainian government’s efforts to restore the damage to the power grid, an estimated six million households are currently without electricity in Kyiv and other cities.

“Ukrainian authorities on Friday gradually restored power, aided by the reconnection of the country’s four nuclear plants, but millions of people were still in the dark after the most devastating Russian air strikes of the war,” the Reuters reported Saturday.

Germany’s DW TV reported the nationwide impact of Russian strikes

Fifteen regions in Ukraine were struggling with water supply problems after repeated Russian strikes against civilian and energy infrastructure. (…)

In the capital, Kyiv, half of the households still had no electricity on Friday. However, one-third of the city’s households were heated again, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said on Telegram.

The water supply in Kyiv had also been fully restored. In the rest of the country, the picture looked bleaker, 15 regions were struggling with water supply problems President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said in a nightly address on Thursday evening.

Russia Firing Refitted Soviet-Era Missiles

According to British intelligence, Russia is repurposing soviet-era nuclear missiles to use them as rockets to hit Ukrainian targets. Massive barrages on Ukrainian targets have reportedly dwindled Russia’s missile stockpiles.

Last month, the Russian military began deploying Iranian drones to intensify its strikes. “Moscow turns to drones as Western official says ‘barrage of precision weapons’ on Ukraine is becoming ‘unsustainable’,” the UK newspaper Telegraph reported in late October.

The TV channel France24 reported the UK intel assessment:

Russia is likely removing nuclear warheads from ageing nuclear cruise missiles and firing unarmed munitions at Ukraine, Britain’s military intelligence said on Saturday.

This comes amid widespread power outages through Ukraine as Russia attacks the country’s infrastructure and bombards Kherson in what appears to be retaliation for Ukrainian military success in the region. (…)

“Whatever Russia’s intent, this improvisation highlights the level of depletion in Russia’s stock of long range missiles”, the defence ministry said in its daily intelligence update on Twitter.

These refitted communist-era missiles may not have the striking power of a regular cruise missile but “could be used by Moscow as decoys to divert Ukrainian air defenses,” Newsweek reported citing UK defense officials.

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Comments

It’s not exactly levelling cities. Dress warm. Share a sleeping bag with a dog.

Russia is reduced to shelling civilian targets of a smaller neighbor. That makes these strikes terrorist acts. Maybe Putin read about how to kill millions of Ukrainians by famine. This is the goal.

    CommoChief in reply to Whitewall. | November 26, 2022 at 6:14 pm

    Nice use of shaming language, ‘a smaller neighbor’. Followed up with attempts to use guilt. Now apply that to Dresden and Tokyo. Then do Ramadi and Fallujah.

    Warfare is incredibly destructive. People are killed, wounded, maimed, crippled, widowed and orphaned. Infrastructure is destroyed, homes toppled, physical plant of types damaged.

    Always better to use diplomacy to resolve disputes IMO and avoid provocation whether that comes from deliberate action, out of misunderstanding, arrogance or ignorance of one’s potential adversary.

      Whitewall in reply to CommoChief. | November 26, 2022 at 6:41 pm

      Shame is what this is. A brief limited military mission to take down Kiev was supposed to be easy for Russia. Why does Ukraine have to be owned by anyone? Why can’t Ukraine be left alone? Putin was lied to by all his subordinates for 20 years while they looted Russia’s capabilities. Now minimally trained officers are leading young men who don’t want to be in Ukraine fighting. Result, with NATO weapons and training, Ukes are driving Russia out of their country and back to Russia.

        CommoChief in reply to Whitewall. | November 27, 2022 at 10:37 am

        You seem to be unaware or unwilling to acknowledge that Ukraine, since the Color revolution of 2014 is a client State of the US. The reality is the conflict is over control of Eastern and Southern Ukraine who’s population is far more pro Russian than many want to admit.

        In essence this conflict boils down to which Eastern European autocrat governs the disputed regions. Either way the Ukrainian people won’t exactly be free of foreign influence and control. There are no white hats in this conflict and certainly not Zelensky who is a creature controlled by the West.

          Whitewall in reply to CommoChief. | November 27, 2022 at 11:56 am

          I agree there are no ‘white hats’ in this but it is long past time to examine pedigrees of the sides. If it is only the east of Ukraine that mattered because there are many Russians there then other lands are in jeopardy as V. Putin made clear in his “Russian Idea” speech of late Sept. this year. We are to believe that Putin only wants an eastern piece? Don’t bet on it. A crusading autocrat like him doesn’t settle for a piece when the whole thing is available. Nuclear blackmail and European’s knack for giving in is what he counts on. No one knows what winning might look like at the moment but it is clear to me that Moscow and Putin’s slipping grip on it needs to be the clear loser. Speaking of losing, Vlad had better watch his grip on the rest of the Russian Federation as some of the Asian members may very well see weakness.

          CommoChief in reply to CommoChief. | November 27, 2022 at 7:37 pm

          Whitewall,

          Putin is an a-hole of a tyrant. No question there. Zelensky is as well but the western media have been carrying water for him and his BS propaganda. Dude arrested his political opposition and seized the broadcast and print media; no dissent allowed. Not the actions of a good guy.

          I don’t care which tyrant rules a portion of Eastern Europe. If the Europeans care so much then they can spend the money to supply Ukraine. It isn’t worth one US life and not another $ from our Treasury.

          All the folks who are so vocal about the importance of Ukraine have an opportunity to prove it by going there in person.

          I doubt they will. Many of the most vocal didn’t do jack squat after 9/11 either, they had two decades but most were no shows. Some also skipped out on Vietnam. These are the same chicken hawks who demand other people send their kids abroad to fight along with their tax dollars. I’m kinda over that BS.

      KEYoder in reply to CommoChief. | November 26, 2022 at 7:47 pm

      I know the history of USSR and Russia with Ukraine is complex (though I think that after Stalin’s deliberate starvation of Ukrainians and replacing them with Russian settlers, the well for unification like Putin claimed to want has been pretty much poisoned), and I’m sympathetic to Russia not wanting NATO on its borders. Nevertheless, Russia DID take over pieces of Ukraine by force over the past decade(s) and has now attempted to take over the rest of the country by force.

      If I understand your point, you are equating Russian attacks on its neighbor with the US response to Japan’s sneak attack (and also to Germany after its prompt declaration of war against us after Pearl Harbor). Or maybe you are saying that all attacks on civilian targets are equally reprehensible? I think the better analogy would be to see Russia as the Germans seeking “lebensraum” by attacking Poland. Rightly or wrongly, the Allied high command attempted to damage Germany’s ability to carry out the war by attacking what they could of Germany–its cities, since their bombers had to operate at night and at high altitude. Japan similarly. I personally don’t think that is quite in the same category as the initial invasion(s), but it is a point that has been debated.

      Ramadi and Fallujah were bases from which guerilla attacks were being launched against U.S. troops, and I believe that the people living there were being brutalized by those same guerillas. Of course, we can argue whether or not the U.S. should have been there at all, but I’m not sure the situations are exactly analagous.

      “Warfare is incredibly destructive. People are killed, wounded, maimed, crippled, widowed and orphaned. Infrastructure is destroyed, homes toppled, physical plant of types damaged.”

      I agree with all of that actually, but if the people at the start of the Revolutionary War can say “Give me liberty or give me death!” and pledge their lives, fortunes, and honor to that belief, I suppose it is possible that Ukrainians may have come to feel the same.

        MarkSmith in reply to KEYoder. | November 26, 2022 at 9:24 pm

        Gotta wonder who the Ukraines need to be freed from, the globalist or the Russians. The are screwed either way

        CommoChief in reply to KEYoder. | November 27, 2022 at 10:48 am

        My point is simple. When we make simplistic arguments that boil down to ‘this Nation is the bad guy because they are bigger and are picking on a smaller Nation’ then we have to be willing to apply the same standard to all Nations including our own.

        I was in Fallujah in ’04 and Ramadi 06/07. The opposition were not good guys. We stacked the bodies very high in both places as well as blowing the hell out those cities. It was well deserved but the US was the decidedly bigger dog in the fight so these simplistic arguments that we should in essence only fight those our own size don’t really work in the real world.

        Whitewall in reply to KEYoder. | November 27, 2022 at 12:03 pm

        You sound like you may be a history buff and may find these interesting. Prof. Timothy Snyder of Yale offers a series of lectures on the long history of Ukraine. There are about a dozen and run a little less than an hour each.

      Evil Otto in reply to CommoChief. | November 27, 2022 at 7:44 am

      “Shaming language?” What are you, a leftist?

      Yes, you’re correct. Warfare is incredibly destructive. Diplomacy is better. Perhaps Putin should have taken your advice and NOT STARTED A WAR. This wasn’t a natural disaster, this was a deliberate act on the part of Putin. He chose to invade Ukraine, and it’s the Ukrainian people (along with the miserable conscripts from Russia) who are paying the price for his arrogance and ignorance of an adversary.

        CommoChief in reply to Evil Otto. | November 27, 2022 at 10:27 am

        Decidedly not a leftist. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t point out the shaming language and phrasing that amount is to ‘don’t fight that person/country because they are smaller’.

        Why did Russia choose to invade? What, from their perspective, drove their decision? Asking those questions isn’t taking Putin’s side. Refusing to ask them or ignoring the answers is foolish.

          “Why did Russia chose to invade”

          The Rus leadership are irridentists. Peter the Great through Tsar Putin the First.

          Putin and the Russian leaders care about the supposed “oppressed” Russians living in countries (former vassals) bordering Russia since they can use them as pretext for invasions and annexation.

          Moldova- Transnistria.
          Georgia- South Osettia
          Ukraine- Crimea
          Ukraine- everything east of the Dnieper.

          The latest pretext being that nearly everyone living in the Donbas basin prefer Russian rule. Same was said of Crimea. That Ukraine was swarming with Fascists! (did you know america is swarming with fascistsnationalists?) Same regarding Osettia. In fact the same was said about Finland – twice! The Bolsheviks said so in 1918 (bourgeois capitalists) and again to launch the 1939 105 day Winter War.

          Note: Russia has invaded and annexed regions on schedule – beginning with Transnistria. It is no mystery why the Rus wait a decade between actions; our institutional and popular memory reset between elections.

          CommoChief in reply to CommoChief. | November 27, 2022 at 7:48 pm

          Tiki,

          I see you listed some of the historical context but not the immediate trigger. The Russians from the Czars through the Soviets until today want a buffer between themselves and potential invaders. Not really surprising given how often they have been invaded.

          They don’t have the Atlantic and Pacific oceans to use as buffers like we do. When the US and UK to a lesser extent staged a soft coup in 2014 the Russians got nervous.

          When the Ukrainian govt harassed the more pro Russian folks in the East because of their more pro Russian outlook the Russian govt noticed. It kept happening and they used it as a pretext for invasion.

          IMO, it would have been better not to provide the pretext and the provocation the Russians are using to an a reason for their current actions. This is on the leadership of the west who allowed their agents to run a little too wild and not keep their client state govt of Ukraine on a tighter leash. The ordinary people of Ukraine are paying the price of that failure.

South African transnationalism, Black/Mandela/Xhosa nationalism, maybe. Serbia/Kosovo revisited, perhaps. It’s been eight years since the Obama-Biden/Maidan/Slavic Spring launched in Ukraine left Crimea without power, food, water, and other resources, then its progress under Zelensky to force Ukrainian deniers of the coup in Kiev to take a knee in the most violent fashion.

A ‘repurposed’ Soviet era ICBM, sans any warhead, is still going to have massive hitting power when it recontacts mother earth.

More importantly, if they’re being fired from their original silos, they’re supposed to notify the US before firing them so that we can see that they’re not going to come over the polar icecap. Uncertainty in that situation could lead to some very bad things happening within minutes. Which means that the US knows that they’re being launched. I wonder if we’re telling the Ukrainians?

    “Uncertainty in that situation could lead to some very bad things happening within minutes.”

    That would only be a problem if we had a brain-dead individual for president who didn’t know what he hell is going on. Fortunately for us, we have Biden.

    “A ‘repurposed’ Soviet era ICBM…”

    Where on earth did you see “ICBM” in this post? The use of a weapon that large and expensive would be incomprehensibly stupid, which the Russians are most definitely not.

    Using Soviet-era (old) cruise missiles is a cheap, smart way to help overwhelm the air defenses that Ukraine has so that useful weapons have a better strike probability.

    If we knew we told them.

    British intelligence…..if you believe their press releases might I interest you in equally reliable press releases from the Ukrainian and Russian governments?

    What is most likely is that Russia just had more capability than the British thought.

    By the way these intel people…remember the Hunter Biden laptop?

Interesting, that after months of war Russia belatedly takes out the power grid in large parts of western Ukraine putting immense pressure on the civilian population and the ability of the west to support offensives in the east.

It looks like it is going to be a long cold winter in western Ukraine and much of Europe for that matter.

It seems that our brain trust has focused on the goal of ousting Putin. If they succeed then what? Do they really believe that if Putin is dead or imprisoned that he will be replaced by a Trudeau like globalist puppet?

In looking at Russian history I don’t see any leader emerging that is not a staunch Russian nationalist whether from the right of left.

    Whitewall in reply to Mauiobserver. | November 26, 2022 at 4:58 pm

    Another ‘Duginist’ style leader may very well appear. It might take the passing of the Boomer Age generation before any meaningful change comes to Russia. It may even take another Russian civil war before they can eventually right themselves and leave ‘rogue state status’ behind.

      Mauiobserver in reply to Whitewall. | November 26, 2022 at 6:36 pm

      Maybe so.

      My point is that whoever leads Russia is likely to be a nationalist beholden to what they see as the best interests of their nation.

      I see almost no chance for any Russian regime putting the globalist agenda of green energy, and woke dogma as the primary goals of their administration.

It may take “another “ civil war in America to right itself!

By the way,
USA IMMEDIATELY sent $400,000,000 to ukraine after the “strikes”

Paul In Sweden | November 26, 2022 at 7:28 pm

Not my war. I do not have a dog in the hunt, I still recall the corrupt nation of Ukraine plotting and conspiring with Hillary Clinton & Soros against the American people to steal the 2016 elections(The US Embassy in Ukraine was refereed to as Hillary Campaign Headquarters with the Ambassador planing a Hillary Clinton Victory Party at the embassy). Russia v. Ukraine, two corrupt countries working against the best interests of America for the benefit of rich oligarchs & the anointed #Pay2Play politicians on Capital Hill and the #Whitehouse, all I can say is keep passing the pop-corn and the GOP house better shut down the foreign aid to Ukraine in January.

Americas social contract – by which we surrender power to the state in return for services and safety – is broken beyond repair. They broke it, not us.

Doesn’t the AP have a creditability problem right now? I wonder if British intel can tell us who blew up the pipeline?

    Mauiobserver in reply to MarkSmith. | November 27, 2022 at 2:13 pm

    Maybe so as the two most likely actors to blow up the pipeline are the US and UK either directly or through proxies. It is unlikely to come out in the lifetime of anyone who reads this board.

    Whatever information our intelligence community has will be classified and hidden for decades perhaps a century.

Russia is just a terrorist organization right now

One cannot win by defense alone. Biden (and other western “leaders’) have not and will not supply the long range weaponry needed to destroy the bombers, airbases, and naval vessels Russia uses for these terroristic attacks.

The only rational explanation is that Biden does not and never did want Ukraine to win. The Afghanistan disaster, Ukraine’s successful initial defense, Russian atrocities, and the political situation resulting forced him to publicly appear to support Ukraine.

I, myself am appalled at NATO’s ceaseless provocations: invading and occupying adjacent regions when it aids their authoritarian mercantilism. Their constant, casual threats of military retribution to economic pressures, or other countries’ alliances is appalling.

At this point Sweden and Finland have it coming, too. What are they thinking, dressing like that?

Or, perhaps, mutual defense treaties with actions triggered by outside military aggression are something different from claiming and annexing convenient nearby regions by injecting unmarked, destabilizing military followed by invasion.

The people being annexed from may be bought off, or simply suck on their own. Even so, there’s some fundamental distinction in which way the guns point. Kinda like which way the wall’s face, but, I digress.

I also think buying people off is different from shooting them: bribery is different from extortion.