Russia has continued to attack targets in Ukraine in recent hours, including energy infrastructure, despite the truce announced Sunday afternoon by the president of the United States, Donald Trump, in a message on Truth, his social network. kyiv directly accuses Russia of breaking it after the attacks of the last few hours, although the president, Volodymyr Zelensky, welcomed Washington's announcement without knowing the details. Moscow, according to its spokesperson, affirms that it maintains contacts and when there is something to say, they will say it. It is not the first time that the Republican president tries to hang the medal on an agreement between both parties that breaks down almost immediately.
Last night, in the north of the Zhitomir region, Russian bombings hit railway and energy infrastructure in the Korosten district, the head of the regional military administration, Vitali Buchenko, reported via social media on Monday. The attack has caused no casualties. This operation follows the attack on a hydroelectric station in the northeastern city of Kharkiv, the second most populated in the country, on Sunday afternoon.
“It is clear that Putin does not read Truth and his Shahed drones follow different instructions,” Zelensky commented with some sarcasm during his video intervention this Monday at a forum held in Warsaw. According to the Ukrainian president, “Russia has violated the energy ceasefire announced by President Trump.” “If Russia does not accept a ceasefire on energy matters, we will respond,” added the president, who stressed that no Russian refineries have been attacked tonight. Moscow depends on oil, but Ukraine depends on energy, the president added.
Despite everything, the Ukrainian authorities have not considered the truce broken. “No one knows” what can happen, a member of the Ukrainian president's team, Volodymyr Zelensky, acknowledges to EL PAÍS. “We are prepared, but we don't know what the Americans think about it,” he adds.
"Contacts continue. As soon as we have something to say, we will inform you," said Putin's spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, this Monday. "The Russians are thinking about it. We will soon know if they are ready," a White House source had told Axios. So far, signals from the Kremlin indicate that its strategy involves not granting a break to Ukraine, so the truce would go against its plans.
The European Union celebrates an agreement that benefits both parties in the conflict, but recognizes that they are waiting for Moscow to comply with it, according to the head of diplomacy, Kaja Kallas. “We welcome the ceasefire in the energy sector as long as it is maintained, although we have not yet seen that Russia also respects it,” Kallas told journalists upon his arrival at a Council of Community Foreign Ministers, reports the Efe agency. The official added that she would like the ceasefire to also include “that no one be killed.”
The Russian Ministry of Defense has insisted since the summer that it will reduce the Ukrainian energy infrastructure to ashes, even if this violates the additional protocols of the Geneva conventions, which require respect for facilities "indispensable for the survival of the civilian population."
“Like snow on the head,” said a poster published by Moscow in summer with the image of one of the new generation drones it uses to destroy energy plants. The Russian Ministry of Defense thus threatened to leave Ukrainians without heat or light at temperatures well below zero in the middle of winter. An intercepted Russian communication confirmed these plans.
The Financial Times newspaper published that the Russian Armed Forces intend to fire 1,000 missiles, drones and bombs at Ukrainian energy plants. kyiv has been suffering restrictions on essential supplies, such as water and electricity, for a week, and with public transport suffering constant stoppages due to the lack of available electrical power.
Beyond the direct attacks on energy infrastructure, according to the Ukrainian Air Force, on the night of Sunday to Monday there was an attack with a Kh-59 guided missile over the Black Sea and 121 drones of different types, of which 76 were jet-propelled, which are faster and more difficult to shoot down. Of all of them, Ukrainian defenses have managed to intercept 89 of the drones, 55 of them jet-powered. They have not been able to avoid, the same sources point out, impacts in fifteen places in the country. On Monday at noon and following the trend of recent days, anti-aircraft defenses thundered in the sky over kyiv in response to the arrival of Russian drones.
The bombings of the last few hours have even reached the Ivano-Frankivsk region, close to the borders of Moldova, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia and Poland. There, authorities reported three deaths on Sunday night. Before this attack was carried out, Zelensky reported that in the last seven days the Russians have killed more than 150 Ukrainian civilians – they do not usually give military figures, which is usually a higher number – and wounded more than 700.
Data centers
Zelensky repeats that the Russian offensive will always have an equivalent response from kyiv. In recent weeks, its troops have attacked, in addition to refineries and other energy facilities, Russian data and logistics centers, such as Wildberries and Ozon. The attacks were immediately noticeable.
Three huge facilities that house the servers of Yandex, known as the Russian Google, have burned in recent days, and services have suffered interruptions. Banks, taxis, delivery and food companies, and firms that operate on the Internet have recorded long and numerous interruptions during the weekend. In addition, some facilities were used to provide cloud services to third parties, and others to train the company's artificial intelligence, one of Moscow's big bets.
The last data center attacked was the one located in the Vladimir region, with 40 megawatts of capacity, equivalent to an average of its rivals Meta or Google. However, the impact of these bombings can be notable in the long term. Russian companies import smuggled chips and other hardware due to sanctions. The Kremlin legalized this practice in 2022 under the euphemism of “parallel imports.” However, the destruction caused by Ukraine to Yandex supercomputers is difficult to replace.
According to statements from industry sources to the newspaper Kommersant, it is “utopian” that Yandex can acquire new equipment before the end of the year. The delivery time for replacements can take up to six months, and their prices will skyrocket due to this extreme need in an international context of hardware shortages due to the enormous demand to power AI.
In addition, Yandex has another factor against it: data centers have started a competition to acquire defensive systems against drones, which will make their services even more expensive for Russians in the midst of escalating inflation.
In every intervention he makes, Vladimir Putin insists that his troops are “advancing in all directions,” although this is not true and he announces the occupation of cities that the Ukrainian armed forces later deny, to the dismay of some Russian ultranationalist channels.
