Russia's Achilles' Heel

November 10, 2025

The air war in Ukraine and Russia escalates, the ground war stalls, and allies are in disarray. Trump reconsiders giving Ukraine Tomahawk missiles to bomb inside Russia, then exempts Putin’s ally, and biggest oil buyer, Hungary, from US energy sanctions aimed at stopping the war. Others will slip through that loophole, namely Slovakia, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Turkey, India, and China, that still finance Russia’s war with oil purchases in defiance of sanctions. So it’s little wonder that Putin persists in Ukraine. As the winter of 2025-26 approaches, the conflict has become an aerial Energy War as the two countries slowly destroy one another’s energy infrastructure. On November 8, Russia demolished all of Ukraine’s thermal plants after they were repaired following prior attacks, leaving millions without heat or lights again. But Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky warned, “If they want to black out us, we will do the same”.

Timeline of missile and drone attacks by Putin

The ground war is at a virtual standstill, thanks mostly to Ukraine’s technological superiority with drones that have reinvented war and eliminated Russia’s manpower advantage. (Latest figures are that Russia has sustained 1.2 million casualties since its 2022 invasion.) But a parallel war escalates—the Energy War—and, once again, Ukraine intends to outsmart the hapless Russians. Kyiv has been destroying Russian oil facilities for months, but now targets Russia’s electricity backbone — power plants, substations, pipelines, and the high-voltage links that stitch the vast Russian grid together. The aim is to take advantage of Russia’s Achilles’ heel: The country is not plugged into its neighbors for electricity during shortages, and cannot build or readily replace damaged turbines because it lacks the industrial base or expertise. By contrast, Ukraine is linked to European power sources, and its sophisticated workforce can quickly repair and replace infrastructure equipment.

Ukraine’s Energy War strategy is both defensive and will be dangerously offensive toward Russia. This is because Ukraine has found another weakness: Russia’s electrical grid itself. In 2005, following a devastating blackout across Russia — due to a humiliating and damaging domestic failure — Moscow cobbled together a sprawling, interconnected system designed to be resilient. But interconnectedness is a double-edged sword: it spreads capacity, and also multiplies points of weakness. Ukraine has discovered that its strikes on localized sites spread deeper inside Russia. In late October and November, its drones and missiles shut down a Moscow suburb, Zhukovsky, which led to damage miles away in Moscow itself and disrupted the country’s railway system.

Another vulnerability is that, unlike Ukraine, which can lean on electricity imports from the European Union when its grid is battered, Russia has no ready “extension cord.” It cannot import Europe’s power. Even friendly neighbours such as Belarus or Kazakhstan lack the technical capacity to bail out Moscow on a large scale. Add to that is Russia’s technological dependencies — its lack of domestic manufacturing for large thermal-turbine components — and the calculus becomes stark. Destroy the turbine halls at thermal plants, and replacement is not an overnight task; spare parts and entire turbines take weeks or months to source.

Ground war is static.

This means Ukraine doesn’t need to strike the Kremlin itself to black out the city and its region. By taking out most of the generation and the high-voltage arteries 100–200 kilometres away, Kyiv can plunge Moscow and other centers into darkness and cold. When Ukraine knocks out grid connections, the rolling outages will cascade, and when it takes out substations, the system’s redundancy frays and spreads, then intensifies. Energy infrastructure is now a new frontier of warfare. Kyiv has found a point of weakness and leverage where time, manufacturing limits, and geopolitics converge. Plunging parts of Russia into darkness is no longer a fantasy. In this awful 21st-century war, electricity and winter may become the decisive weapons.

Russia’s poorly designed system became apparent recently. In late October, a major blackout occurred in a city near Moscow called Zhukovsky following drone attacks miles away. That blackout, in turn, disrupted Moscow as well as Russia’s electricity-dependent rail transport systems. Ukrainian intelligence had simply damaged a key fuel pipeline near Moscow, but the result provided a “proof of concept” that local precision strikes could spread to energy and logistics hubs deep inside Russian territory.

Ukrainian military expert, Pavlo Narozhnyi, said this engineering failure represents Russia’s biggest vulnerability and Ukraine’s biggest advantage: “The thing is that even when the Russians destroy powerful power plants in Ukraine, we have an `extension cord’ - electricity is supplied to us from the European Union. In contrast, Russia, if something bad happens, has no one to rely on - it has to rely solely on itself. It will not work to connect, for example, to Kazakhstan (or another country), because no one will give Russia the electricity it needs.”

Ukraine attacks Russia’s grid. Euromaidan

He added that Russia’s technological dependence makes repairs difficult. “So, if we destroy turbine halls (with missiles) at thermal power plants in Russia, this will cause a huge electricity shortage.” In other words, Ukraine can cripple Moscow and other cities without striking them directly, but by destroying the generating capacity that surrounds them, even if 100 or 200 kilometers away. Ukraine’s drones can shut down the enemy’s electricity grid simply by destroying the connections between its localized power grids, he added. “Our strikes are gradually knocking out the structure that supports the transportation of electricity between time zones. We are not very far from the critical point - there is 40, 60 percent left. When we take out high-voltage substations... the outages will be more intense than in Ukraine, I guarantee you.”

Other experts are cautious in their prognostications, but the consensus is that “such a strategy is technically possible and strategically needed,” according to Ukrinform. American Tomahawks would be useful, but Trump wobbles and Russia threatens nuclear retaliation. However, Ukraine has long-range missiles in its arsenal, including home-made ones, as well as increasingly powerful, long-range drones. These weapons now batter Russia’s system and, combined with Ukraine’s technological and strategic expertise, are poised to cause widespread electrical failure throughout Moscow and other capitals. By attacking the “branches”, the “root” can be destroyed, and Russia’s air-defense systems designed to protect major urban areas can be bypassed.

Zelensky’s government won’t comment on the new strategy in detail. However, Andriy Kovalenko, head of Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation, emphasized: “A cold winter awaits them… because a reciprocal response will inevitably come. And it will be very painful, because the bigger the country – and Russia is bigger – the harder it is to repair and restore. And they, unlike us, made no preparations for strikes on their energy sector.”

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