[1]
By John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with [2]
The daily record of Russian drone and missile strikes across the Ukraine shows not only an escalation in the scale and firepower of the electric war but also a new strategy of targeting designed by the General Staff.
The lead image shows the launch and strike points on the battlefield map which have been identified in the Ukrainian reporting over the evening of October 21-22 [3].
“In response to Ukraine’s terrorist attacks on civilian targets in Russia,” the Defense Ministry bulletin, issued in Moscow on the afternoon of October 22, has reported [4], “the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation launched a massive strike tonight [October 21-22] with high-precision long-range ground- and air-based weapons, including Kinzhal hypersonic aeroballistic missiles, as well as unmanned aerial vehicles at energy infrastructure facilities which support the operation of the military-industrial complex of Ukraine. The targets of the strike have been achieved; all designated targets have been hit.”
From Kiev the impact of the strikes on the loss of electricity and the duration of power outages has been confirmed officially. The blackout in the eastern regions of the country now extends from early morning to late evening. “Ukraine was forced to introduce electricity shutdown schedules in 12 regions, Minister of Energy Svetlana Hrynchuk said on Thursday…Energy workers are forced to apply hourly shutdown schedules in 12 regions of Ukraine, the minister said. According to her, the restrictions will be from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. ‘Depending on how quickly the repair and restoration work is completed, we will adjust the schedules and hope that the burden on Ukrainians will be less,’ Hrynchuk noted. ‘Today, the enemy again attacked energy facilities purposefully, primarily in such regions as Sumy region and Chernigov region; there was also certain damage in Dnipropetrovsk region and Kharkov region,’ the minister said [5].”
“The General Staff goal appears to be blackout east of the Dnieper and excess or lack of power generation in the west,” comments an expert source; he is an electrical engineer and veteran of NATO electric war campaigns. “If the Ukrainians can’t make up for the generation losses in the east via transfers from the west — which they won’t be able to do as the switch stations and transmission lines are being destroyed — then it’s black-out in Dniepropetrovsk, Chernigov, Poltava, Sumy, and Kharkov. West of the Dnieper River, this could create a situation where the Kiev government will be forced to shut down reactors. The reason is that generating too much electricity can be almost as bad as not generating enough in terms of the effect on frequency [6]. ”
“Another possibility is that the Ukrainians are being forced into desperate measures such as emergency power transfers to the east. This can be detected in jury-rigging of high voltage tie-ins; not having the protection elements properly coordinated; reliance on damaged or dodgy switchgear. Combined, these factors are causing a cascading power losses in the east and west of the country, or at least parts of it.”
Parallel analyses reported [7] by other sources confirm that “Russia is employing a new tactic aimed at completely disabling the energy system on the left bank of the Dnipro. This is creating an imbalance in power supply between western and eastern Ukraine: a critical electricity shortage is emerging in the east due to the destruction of thermal and hydroelectric plants, while a surplus of energy is present in the west, where nuclear power plants operate. This surplus cannot be effectively transferred eastward due to limited grid capacity.”
The record of Russia’s electric war strikes in the Ukraine began on October 10-12 and 16-20, 2022; then followed on October 22-27, 2023; March 29-30, 2024; June 1, 2024; and November 7, 2024. Click to follow each stage of the electric war [8].
[9]Source: https://johnhelmer.net/russian-army-fires-old-sparky-us-loses-the-electric-war-in-the-ukraine/ [10]
Initially, President Vladimir Putin agreed with the General Staff that they could target power generating plants and the power grids transmitting electricity to the main population centres. Triggering population evacuation from east to west, then into Poland, was one of the political goals Putin agreed. Cutting the train lines between Poland, Lvov and Kiev was not. This allowed almost unrestricted inflow of US and NATO weapons and men to supply the eastern front, including the Ukrainian attack and occupation of Kursk region which began on August 6, 2024; also, the movement of western political and media figures to and from Kiev for escalation of the propaganda war against Russia. The open rail lines have been used to demonstrate the US-NATO propaganda line that Ukraine is winning, Russia losing the war.
Putin then accepted President Donald Trump’s proposal for a 30-day halt to attacks on the Ukrainian and Russian civilian energy infrastructure; that began after their telephone call on February 12. However, Trump’s war staffs in Washington, Poland, and the Ukraine did not honour the Putin-Trump telephone agreement; it turned into a unilateral, unreciprocated Putin concession. Instead, the Trump administration and their NATO allies have steadily escalated their drone and missile attacks on Russian energy infrastructure, including oil pumping sites, oil storages, gas pipelines and processing plants, port terminals, and oil refineries.
The tone of the war decision-making process [11] in Moscow has sharpened as these enemy attacks have escalated, striking targets deeper in the Russian hinterland. Trump has escalated further this week, revealing that while he has not yet authorized the delivery of Tomahawk long-range missiles to be launched from the Ukraine into Russia, he has tacitly agreed to the firing of UK, French and German-supplied missiles at longer range inside Russia.
[12]Source: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/115419686256202789 [11]
For a history of the electric war campaign in its first phase of 2022, compiled in London in February 2023 by the Centre for Information Resilience (CIR), click to read [13].
CIR describes [14] its objectives as “exposing human rights abuses and war crimes, countering disinformation and combating online behaviour harmful to women and minorities”. The source is funded by grants from the UK government’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, the US State Department, and Australia’s Department for Foreign Affairs and Trade. The two founding directors of CIR, Ross Burley and Adam Rutland, have had careers with intelligence and propaganda units of the British Foreign Office [15]. The UK government has given at least £2.7 million to CIR; about 40% of this money was provided since the start of Russia’s Special Military Operation in February 2022 [15].
[16]Source: https://www.info-res.org/app/uploads/2024/11/Weaponizing-Winter.pdf [13]
In this year’s European experience, the NATO expert source points to the blackout across Spain and Portugal, which occurred in April 2025, to illustrate [17] what can go wrong.
Analyzing the electric war operations in the Ukraine in September and October, this source says: “We don’t know what the General Staff knows in terms of the status of protection and control elements of the Ukrainian grid as a whole. What we do know, via the detailed damage reports we’re seeing on Telegram, is that they have fairly strong intelligence on what they are hitting and the impact it’s having. It is also very possible that the latest strikes are being planned around assessment of the impact of the damage to Ukrainian generation, transmission, and distribution infrastructure, especially in the 330/110kV range, which was inflicted before Putin’s concession to Trump last February.”
“One thing is certain, the attacks are not random; they’re working at something besides just blacking out industries supporting the Ukrainian war effort as the Defense Ministry daily reports declare. It also appears that they are avoiding hitting switchyards that supply power to Ukrainian NPP cooling and monitoring equipment. This tells us that they want the Ukrainians to be forced to throttle or shut down nuclear power generation themselves in order to avoid larger issues west of the Dnieper.”
“Based also on what we’re seeing in terms of attacks on gas, oil, coal, rail infrastructure, I believe the current phase of [Chief of the General Staff General Valery] Gerasimov’s electric war is five-pronged, with each prong complementing and acting as a multiplier for the others:
1) destroy Ukrainian electrical generation capacity east of the Dnieper;
2) destroy Ukrainian electrical transmission and distribution capacity east of the Dnieper to undermine power transfer schemes from western Ukraine;
3) create conditions whereby the Ukrainians are forced to either:
a) make risky expedient repairs to send power east which could overtax and possibly cause failures in the already compromised west Ukrainian grid;
b) potentially reduce nuclear power plant generation to avoid frequency issues caused by loads to the east, including Kiev, going offline — a delicate balance made even more so by the compromised nature of the grid overall;
4) destroy or severely degrade Ukrainian repair and replacement efforts via strikes on rail and port infrastructure, including traction power stations (which compete for much of the same protection and control equipment as their larger transmission and distribution cousins), and rolling stock;
5) destroy or severely degrade Ukrainian capacities for providing fuel to the back-up or restored, conventionally powered (TPP/CHP [thermal power plants, combined heat and power plants]) generation schemes.”
The source concludes: “I also believe the Ukrainian electrical grid is in much, much worse shape than we are being led to believe; that spares are in acutely short supply and extremely expensive. As with the air defence systems, the Europeans and Americans can’t keep up.”