Russian strikes hit Kyiv ahead of war anniversary

Russia’s latest wave of missile and drone strikes on Kyiv, timed around the fourth anniversary of the full-scale invasion, underlines a reality that European security debates still treat as a footnote: modern war against a neighbouring state is, in practice, a war on energy systems.

France 24 reported early Sunday that Russian missiles hit Kyiv, with air-defence activity and damage reported in the capital as Ukraine approached the war’s anniversary. Al Jazeera, in a separate explainer, framed the campaign as Russia “weaponising winter” — not merely by battlefield manoeuvre, but by repeatedly targeting power generation, substations and transmission nodes to induce blackouts, freeze households, disrupt industry and force political concessions.

The strategic logic is straightforward. Electricity is a high-leverage choke point: it is both a civilian necessity and the backbone of command-and-control, logistics, telecoms, rail transport, water pumping, and repair capacity. Unlike many military targets, grid assets are geographically fixed, hard to conceal, and expensive to replace. In game-theory terms, Russia is exploiting Ukraine’s asymmetric defence problem: the attacker chooses time and place; the defender must protect everything.

That asymmetry cascades into a set of policy choices, each with its own incentives and path dependencies.

First, redundancy. A hardened grid means spare transformers, distributed generation, microgrids, protected interconnectors and stockpiles. It is also capital-intensive and slow. Ukraine can build resilience, but the benefits are diffuse while the costs are immediate — a classic political economy trap. Donors, meanwhile, prefer visible “reconstruction” projects to quiet investments in spare parts and boring engineering.

Second, centralised crisis management. When the grid becomes a weapon, governments tend to centralise: emergency powers, rationing, priority lists, and command-style allocation of fuel, repairs and imports. That can reduce response time, but it also creates new single points of failure and new rents. Scarcity plus discretion is an invitation for corruption, patronage and the bureaucratic habit of making “temporary” controls permanent.

Third, political fixes. If power is repeatedly knocked out, leaders are pushed toward headline solutions: rapid procurement of air defence, subsidised electricity, or ad hoc deals for emergency imports. These measures can stabilise the short run while deepening long-run dependence — on foreign financing, on a limited set of suppliers, or on cross-border grid ties that themselves become bargaining chips.

For the EU, the lesson is uncomfortable. Ukraine’s vulnerability is not unique; Europe’s own decarbonisation plans are making electricity even more central by electrifying transport and heating. A continent that concentrates energy in fewer generation types and longer supply chains while underinvesting in grid hardening is effectively writing an invitation letter to anyone willing to treat infrastructure as a battlefield.

Europe can chant “strategic autonomy” all it wants. But as long as energy resilience is treated as climate policy’s administrative afterthought — rather than defence policy’s physical foundation — winter will remain a weapon, and the bill will keep arriving in the form of emergency packages, not prevention.