The Kremlin thought it would sweep across Ukraine and take Kyiv in a matter of days.
Now, more than nine months into its disastrous war with Ukraine, the new Russian strategy of targeting the infrastructure that brings light, heat and water into millions of Ukrainian homes has revealed Russia’s own weakness and its desperation in the face of a defiant Ukrainian resistance.
Russia’s impotence – and the scale of the destruction wrought by Moscow against territory it considers its own – has leaked back into official statements, even as the Kremlin seeks to leave Ukraine in a dire state on the cusp of a bitter winter.
At moments, Russian officials have compared the destruction in Ukrainian cities and its strategy to that of the second world war, nearly portraying the strategy as one of scorched earth.
At a press conference on Thursday, the foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, was given a tough question about Russia’s shelling of Kherson, a city it claimed to annex in September and then fled from in November, and now regularly shells from across the banks of the Dnipro River.
“How can you justify missile attacks on the civilian population, infrastructure, depriving people of access to water and electricity, including in the area of Kherson, which Russia considers its territory?” he was asked.
“The city of Stalingrad was our territory,” replied Lavrov, referring to the modern city of Volgograd that was stage to the deadliest battle of the second world war. “We hit the Germans such that they ran away from there.”
Moscow’s current strategy stands in stark contrast to Russia’s initial plan: a shock-and-awe strike on Kyiv and other cities that would let them take over the country and its key infrastructure within weeks.
“This campaign would not target critical infrastructure such as power stations and railways, because these were vital to Russia’s plans for occupying the country,” said a report this week released by Britain’s Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) thinktank, which revealed details from official orders captured from retreating Russians troops. “The elimination of Ukraine’s political leadership would primarily be a task for Russia’s special services. Another line of effort, allocated to Russia’s special forces and air-assault troops, was to capture Ukraine’s power stations, airfields, water supplies, central bank and parliament.”
Now, the opposite appears to be true. While Russia’s attacks on power infrastructure have been designed to show strength, coming shortly after it was forced to retreat from key towns and cities in Ukraine’s south-east, they nonetheless expose Russia’s clear weakness going into winter.
Vladimir Putin has defended the strikes against Ukrainian infrastructure, seeking to equate them with alleged Ukrainian strikes in Russian border regions and a recent explosion on the Kerch bridge.
In a telephone conversation on Friday, he told the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, the attacks were a “forced and inevitable response to Kyiv’s provocative attacks against Russia’s civilian infrastructure, including the Crimean Bridge and energy facilities”.
Top Russian pundits and propagandists have openly admitted Russia has no other strategy: from planning to capture Ukraine, they have now moved on to a plan to simply cripple the country. Doing so, they now tell the public, may prevent Russia from suffering an even greater defeat.
“They are planning to take our Crimea,” said Margarita Simonyan, the RT head, referring to the peninsula occupied by Russia in 2014.
There are no indications that Ukraine is planning an imminent operation toward Crimea, although fortifications have begun appearing along the Russian frontlines of the conflict, indicating they are struggling to hold ground.
“And we are doing the only thing that we can do in this situation. We’re bombing them. We’re bombing them every day. We’re bombing their infrastructure. God knows that isn’t what we wanted. I know that this isn’t what our leaders wanted either,” said Simonyan.
Whether or not that’s the case, it is clear that Russia has abandoned its own pretence of a war fought with restraint. According to the plans reported by RUSI, Russia is in uncharted territory: its FSB security service never bothered to engage in contingency planning, “nor envisaged any outcome other than its own success”.
The new strategy targeting civilian infrastructure is more difficult to sell to the Russian public. A person who occupies a management position at a state media agency said editors were being encouraged to focus on how the strikes were affecting the Ukrainian military, rather than lingering on their humanitarian impact.
But there are mixed messages. Senior officials such as the former president Dmitry Medvedev have openly gloated about the humanitarian disaster facing Ukraine, writing that first Russia must win, and “then we’ll sort out the lights”.
Yet on television cheerleaders for the war have also focused on worst-case scenarios, as Russia continues to cede ground and appears to lack an answer for countering the Ukrainian advance.
Vladimir Soloviev, a popular television host, regularly brings up the possibility that Russia could use a nuclear weapon if it feels that Crimea is threatened. Others are using similar arguments to try to steel national resolve, claiming that the country is close to being torn apart.
“What do we care if another neighbourhood of Kyiv is left without light or disappears?” said Simonyan during a show with Soloviev. She claimed Russian leaders could face a Hague tribunal if they lost the war. Her logic was simple: there is no turning back for Russia now.
