Russia hits Kyiv energy and rail infrastructure

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Russia struck Kyiv and multiple Ukrainian regions overnight with roughly 50 missiles and nearly 300 attack drones, targeting energy facilities and damaging rail infrastructure, according to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Local authorities said at least one person was killed in the Kyiv region and 15 were injured, including four children, while parts of the capital lost power as temperatures fell to about −11°C.

The attack fits the war’s increasingly explicit focus on systems that keep daily life and commerce running: electricity generation and transmission, and the rail network that moves people, troops and freight. When a strike knocks out power, the bill is not only measured in destroyed transformers and emergency repairs; it also appears as lost production, disrupted logistics, and the cost of keeping backup capacity on standby. Rail disruptions compound that damage by turning fuel, spare parts and humanitarian supplies into scheduling problems, and by forcing more traffic onto roads already constrained by winter conditions.

For Ukraine’s partners, the economic spillovers are indirect but persistent. A grid that must be rebuilt under fire becomes a permanent consumer of imported equipment, emergency generators and financing, while insurers and lenders price in a higher probability of repeat losses. The longer the conflict trains actors to treat infrastructure as a legitimate target, the more Europe’s own electrification strategy inherits a security premium: heat pumps, EV charging and data centres all rely on uninterrupted power, and the cost of redundancy rises when sabotage and long-range strikes are no longer theoretical.

Private resilience tools exist—microgrids for critical sites, islandable local generation, contracted backup power, and pricing that rewards peak reduction—but they work best when scarcity is allowed to show up in prices and procurement decisions. In practice, electricity policy across Europe has leaned on subsidies, price caps and centrally planned capacity targets, which can suppress the very signals that would justify hardening investments before a crisis. When outages arrive anyway, governments tend to socialise the costs through emergency support and reconstruction packages, leaving households and firms with the disruption and the foregone output.

On Sunday, Zelenskyy said the energy sector was the main target and that residential buildings were also hit. The same message included a second detail that often disappears in headline summaries: there was damage to the railway.

In a war approaching its fifth year, Ukraine is still counting missiles and drones. It is also counting transformers and timetables.