Russia shifts to region-based attacks on Ukraine’s energy and gas infrastructure

Russia has begun to strike at energy and gas distribution facilities on a regional basis, Deputy Energy Minister Mykola Kolisnyk said at the forum "Energy that keeps Ukraine going" on Monday.

"If earlier the enemy tried to disunite the system, to unbalance it, today it focuses on attacks on a regional basis," he said .

"The situation is the same with natural gas. The enemy has started attacking some facilities, I won't name them, on which the distribution of natural gas to a particular settlement depends. They are not strategic, there are bypasses for them, but still the enemy is testing this situation, trying to reduce the capacity of gas transportation to a specific key heating facility or others," said the Deputy Minister .

He added that a large number of air assets are being used for the attacks to overwhelm air defenses.

"A whole swarm of UAVs plus different types of missiles are targeting a specific single object. This exhausts air defense, even if the object is prioritized. And as a result, we have attacks that damage the power system," Kolisnyk said .

• Vitaliy Zaichenko, Chairman of the Board of NPC Ukrenergo, also said that the Russians have changed their tactics of attacking the Ukrainian energy infrastructure and are now trying to gradually bring the system to an unusable state .