Doesn’t seem to be much question: they’re hitting dams (not to destroy the dam, I suspect, to take out the hydropower and the river crossing point) and various other power infrastructure, night after night.
This is something they hadn’t done before: there had been some attacks, but nothing systematic.
This isn’t a new tactic: in the 90s Gulf War, the US took out nineteen of twenty power plants, which led to water treatment and supply issues, which lead to c. one million deaths from cholera. To this day Iraq doesn’t have enough power. They also directly hit water infrastructure, and they used similar tactics in the 2000s Iraq war.
One of the “good” things about the Ukraine war until now is Putin’s refusal to get down into the mud with such tactics, and I’m disappointed he’s now done so. There is some military case: the railroads are electrified, for example, and Russia is getting ready for a huge offensive, probably starting in May.
Of course, after what the US and the EU have condoned in Palestine, they are in no position to complain about such “relatively” mild actions. Putin isn’t trying to cause a famine and commit genocide and the profile of deaths is far different: the Israelis killed more children in a month than both sides in the Ukraine war have killed in years.
An effect of this is going to be another huge wave of refugees to Europe. Pragmatically, though not ethically, this puts more pressure on the Europeans and I’m sure Putin knows that and wants it to happen.
The war is reaching its endgame. Russia is going to crush Ukraine then enforce the peace they want. I would assume they’ll take Odessa and the entire coast, and otherwise just the Russian majority regions and the land bridge, but they’ll conquer far more of that to force Ukraine and the US to the table.
Ukraine will be a complete basket case after the war, and rebuilding will be done on standard neoliberal debt and looting terms. Meanwhile, there will be far more women than men.
The war should have ended a couple months after it started. Ukraine would have ended in far better shape and hundreds of thousand of soldiers would be alive.
But that’s not what the West wanted, and why should they care, after all. They were, and are, fighting to the last Ukrainian.
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