Ukraine this week sought to adapt its defenses against Russian drones in preparation for further attacks on its energy infrastructure as winter temperatures continued to drop to -20 degrees Celsius (-4 degrees Fahrenheit).
On Thursday, Ukraine’s Energy Minister Denis Shmyar warned Ukrainians to prepare for further power outages in the coming days as Russian air strikes continue.
Prime Minister Yulia Sviridenko said Russia has attacked energy infrastructure 217 times this year. Shmyar said 200 emergency workers were working to restore power to 1,100 buildings in Kiev alone.
Russia has targeted power plants, gas pipelines and transmission cables in Ukraine since mid-January, leaving hundreds of thousands of people without heat and electricity.
On January 29, US President Donald Trump told a Cabinet meeting that Russian President Vladimir Putin had agreed to halt attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure for one week, a statement confirmed by the Kremlin.
“I personally asked President Putin not to fire on Kyiv and various cities for a week, and President Putin agreed,” Trump said.
It is unclear when exactly that conversation took place, but on Tuesday of this week Russia launched its largest ever attack on energy infrastructure in Kiev and Kharkov, deploying 71 missiles and 450 drones.
Ukrainian Air Force spokesman Yury Ifnat said Ukraine was only able to shoot down 38 missiles because a very high percentage of them were ballistic missiles.
Russia’s Ministry of Defense claimed it was targeting unmanned aerial vehicles, defense companies and storage locations for their energy supplies.
The attack coincided with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte’s visit to Kyiv and came a day before trilateral talks between Russia, Ukraine and the United States resumed in Abu Dhabi.
“Last night, in our view, Russia broke its promise,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said at a press conference with Prime Minister Rutte. “So either Russia now believes that there are less than four days in a week instead of seven, or they are seriously betting on just war.”
The strike also comes as Kiev succeeded in reducing the number of unheated apartments to around 500 from 3,500 three days earlier.
At least two people, both 18 years old, were killed while walking on the street in Zaporizhzhia, southeastern Ukraine.
Even on relatively calm days, civilian deaths occur in Russia. On Sunday, February 1, Russia killed more than a dozen miners when a drone crashed into a bus transporting miners to work in central Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsky Oblast.
Evolving drone tactics
After several days of actually observing a pause in energy-related attacks, Russia instead focused on attacks on Ukrainian logistics and attempted to expand the reach of its drones.
Serhiy “Flash” Beskhrestnov, a technical and drone warfare advisor at Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense, reported that Russian drones were attacking Ukrainian trucks 50 kilometers (31 miles) from the front lines. He also said Russia had modified the Guerin drone to act “as a carrier” for smaller first-person view (FPV) drones, doubling the range of the two relatively inexpensive systems.
Ukrainian broadcaster Suspirin said Russia began these new tactics in mid-January.
The Ukrainian Air Force managed to shoot down about 90 percent of Russia’s long-range drones and most of its missiles, or about 22,000 targets in January alone.
But President Zelensky has recently called for better results, and one of Ukraine’s responses to Russian tactics is a new short-range “small air defense” force that uses unmanned aircraft to counter drones.
“Hundreds of UAVs” [unmanned aerial vehicle] “The crew has already been transferred to the operational control of the Air Force Group and is carrying out tasks in the first and second stages of the interception,” General of Ukraine Oleksandr Shirsky wrote on Wednesday this week.
Ukraine’s second response was to disable Russia’s Starlink terminals, which Russia uses extensively on the battlefield and which it recently began installing on unmanned aerial vehicles.
Starlink uses low-orbit satellites, which are less susceptible to jamming, allowing Russia to change the drone’s intended target mid-flight.
Ukraine’s new defense minister, Mykhail Fedorov, created a “whitelist” of Starlink terminals used by the Ukrainian military and sent it to Starlink’s owner, Elon Musk, asking him to keep them operational while shutting down all other terminals in the Ukrainian theater.
“Soon, only certified and registered terminals will work in Ukraine. Everything else will be disconnected,” Fedorov wrote on Telegram.
“It appears that the steps we took to prevent Russia’s unauthorized use of Starlink are working. If further action is needed, please let us know,” Musk tweeted on Sunday.
Mr. Fedorov and Mr. Beskhrestnov are asking Ukrainian soldiers and civilians to whitelist their personally acquired Starlink devices.
Further sanctions are planned
On the day of Russia’s major strike, President Zelenskiy appealed to the United States to pass legislation imposing further sanctions on buyers of Russian oil. The largest country is China, followed by India.
A day earlier, President Trump said Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi had agreed to halt purchases of Russian crude oil. “He has agreed to stop buying Russian oil and buy even more oil from the United States and possibly Venezuela. This will help end the war in Ukraine,” he wrote on the social media platform.
A Russian government official told Reuters that Russia’s budget deficit plan for this year could triple from 1.6% of GDP to 3.5% or 4.4% of GDP, assuming a 30% drop in oil sales to India and a drop in sales to other customers. The Kremlin’s energy revenue in January was $5.13 billion, half of its January 2025 level, according to government data released Wednesday.
President Zelenskiy also discussed the currently being prepared 20th sanctions package with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. “We can already see what is happening to the Russian economy and what will happen if pressure is applied effectively,” he said.
Russia has made little progress on the ground over the past three years, a fact that has been repeatedly documented and most recently confirmed in a CSIS report. Nevertheless, Ukrainian government officials last week continued to push for peace terms that would force Ukraine to relinquish control of four southeastern regions, reduce its military and agree not to join NATO, terms that Ukraine rejects.
Talks resumed in Abu Dhabi on Wednesday and Thursday, with only 157 prisoners exchanged on each side.
