Russia defends energy grid hits
6 milion people in Ukraine remain without power
MOSCOW >> As Ukrainian officials warned that Moscow was preparing to launch yet another wave of missile strikes aimed at destroying the nation's energy grid, Russia's foreign minister Thursday defended Moscow's attacks, calling infrastructure a legitimate military target despite U.N. warnings that they could amount to war crimes.
Sergey Lavrov, Russia's foreign minister, spoke at a news conference hours after Ukrainian officials said Russian attacks had disabled the power grid in the southern city of Kherson and 6 million people across the country were still without power after previous assaults.
Drawing on familiar Kremlin themes framing the Ukraine war as a battle with the West, Lavrov said that Russia is hitting targets that are used to replenish Ukrainian forces with weapons provided by Western nations and that the Ukrainian forces rely on to operate. He did not elaborate.
The Ukrainian military has said its forces have their own autonomous energy supply and the strikes had no impact on their fighting capability.
But the impact on civilians is mounting. The strikes have knocked out electricity and water for millions of people in Ukraine, and Ukrainian and Western officials have accused Russia of trying to make life miserable for people by striking residential areas, electrical transformers, power plants and other civilian targets.
“As Ukraine continues to seize momentum on the battlefield, President Putin continues to focus his ire and his fire on Ukraine's civilian population,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony
Blinken said at a meeting of NATO allies this week.
Ukrainian officials say it could take months to repair the damage already done to the grid, and there was no indication the attacks would stop.
“There is still a threat of missile strikes on critical infrastructure of Ukraine and military facilities in the near future,” Brig. Gen. Oleksii Hromov, a member of Ukraine's general staff, warned Thursday. “The enemy's goal is to cause panic in the population.”
Lavrov said Russia used high-precision weapons against Ukrainian energy facilities that support Kyiv's combat operations and are used “to pump up Ukraine with Western weapons for it to kill Russians.”
He defended Russia's strikes against Ukrainian areas that Moscow has illegally annexed and now considers its own territory, such as the Kherson region, comparing its assaults to Stalingrad, which was leveled during one of the bloodiest battles of World War II when Soviet forces achieved a pivotal victory against Nazi Germany.
“Stalingrad was our territory too, and we have beaten Germans there so much that they ran away,” Lavrov said.
Repeating Russia's talking points, he accused the
United States and Europe of being “directly involved” in the Ukraine conflict, which, he said, was sparked by NATO's expansion in Eastern Europe and Western meddling in Ukraine's affairs.
He also dismissed as “laughable” the idea that Moscow is trying to engage Kyiv in cease-fire negotiations as a way to buy time and replenish its forces amid setbacks on the battlefield. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba has warned that a cease-fire would allow Russia's “depleted invasion forces to take a break before returning for further aggression.”
“We have never asked for any negotiations,” Lavrov said. “But we have always said that if someone is interested in finding a negotiated solution, we are ready to listen.”
Lavrov also accused NATO of stirring up tensions elsewhere in the world, including with China, and of trying to drag India into what he called “an anti-Russian and antiChinese alliance.” India and China have both called for de-escalation after Russian strikes.
Meanwhile, the call-up of men to fight in Ukraine has left labor so scarce in Russia that entire industries are in distress.
Two months after the Kremlin announced the mobilization in late September, a record depletion of workers is fast spreading across a country already hobbled by an aging and shrinking population and with unemployment near the lowest ever. A study by the Gaidar Institute in Moscow in November found that up to a third of Russian industry may face a deficit of personnel because of the draft, the most severe crunch since 1993.
Agrokomplex, a large agricultural company in the south, now struggles to fill openings for tractor drivers and other workers, in addition to the specialists in areas like agronomy, said Irina Khmelevskaya, head of recruitment. The mobilization is partly to blame, she said.
The mobilization of 300,000 men, combined with an even bigger wave of emigration it triggered, will reduce the male labor pool by 2%. That's among the main reasons that Bloomberg Economics now puts Russia's potential economic growth rate at just 0.5% — or half its pre-war level. The threat that labor shortages would eventually bring inflationary pressure has already prompted the Bank of Russia to put interest-rate cuts on hold.