Navalny: strikes on Ukraine’s energy system ‘make no military sense’

In a post published on his social media channels, politician Alexey Navalny condemned Russian shelling of Ukrainian energy infrastructure.

“It’s amazing how much our propagandists (in my case on a radio in my cell) savor and take malicious pleasure in talking about the destruction of Ukraine’s energy system,” Navalny writes.

No, of course I don’t expect these demons to have even elementary sympathy for innocent civilians who ended up in a horrible situation. It’s more that I’m puzzled about why they can’t look further than their own noses and take simple things into account.

First, he points out that strikes on civilian infrastructure “do not at all demonstrate the power and boldness of Russian weapons, on the contrary, [they show] the helplessness of the Russian army.” Russian residents, Navalny thinks, understand that the strikes don’t make sense militarily.

Second, and most importantly, he writes that strikes on Ukraine use missiles “invented (and often even manufactured) in the USSR,” and Iranian drones which Navalny calls “flying mopeds.”

Ukraine, Navalny continues, can definitely “make something no worse than Iranian flying mopeds, and most likely something even better.” Then, he warns, Ukraine will start to retaliate with strikes on Russian territory. “We have no idea how our air defenses work in practice,” writes Navalny.

We’ll soon see that, as they say, two can play this game. And then Ukrainians will take out the lights and the heat first in Kursk and Belgorod, then in Voronezh, and then in Moscow. Then who will we complain to, when we have to heat our children’s food over a candle flame?

• Since October 10, Russian troops have carried out wide-scale strikes on Ukrainian cities. Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that the shelling is a response to the explosion on the Crimean bridge, which happened on October 8. According to an early December announcement from Ukrainian state energy company Ukrenergo, shelling has damaged all of the country’s thermal and hydroelectric power plants. All over Ukraine for several months, outages, which are necessary to stabilize the electrical grid, occur daily for several hours. Due to ongoing shelling in Kyiv, Odesa, and other cities the electricity has been out repeatedly, and in states of emergency water and heat services have also stopped.