Russia has intensified a strategy of attrition that aims less to gain ground than to disrupt daily life, and it has done so hitting the energy system Ukrainian to leave the country without electricity, without heating and without basic services at the cruelest time of the year. Faced with Moscow’s missiles, kyiv has called in a group of kamikaze hunters with a very clear plan.
The terror ends. It we count last week. With temperatures plummeting to -20ºC and a network already weakened by months of attacks, waves of missiles and drones they seek to collapse substations, electrical infrastructure and nodes that sustain urban heat, and there is even fear of a more precise campaign against points that feed to nuclear plants.
The goal it’s simple: turn the cold into political pressure, erode civil resistance and push kyiv towards a negotiation under torment, just when the United States tries to open a diplomatic path. The result is a country forced to live in survival modewith blackouts that last for days in some districts, thousands of buildings without heat in the capital, schools closed and citizens who, unable to leave, endure in dark and frozen homes, wrapped in blankets, with candles, camping burners and a shared feeling that the front is no longer only in the trenches, but also in the living room.
Heat, water and normality under minimums. In cities like kyiv, the blow is especially dangerous because the heating depends on centralized systems that distribute hot water from cogeneration plants, and when the supply is cut off in the middle of the ice, the risk is not only of being cold, but also of the pipes freezing and bursting, causing flooding when the service returns.
That is why the authorities have come to recommend draining circuits in thousands of buildings, accepting temporary cold weather to avoid a major disaster, while repairs are made slow and difficult by the weather and repeated attacks.
Searching for fire. Life is reorganized around of heat points: public centers where people take shelter, charge mobile phones and receive hot food, and extraordinary solutions such as adapted trains as mobile hubs to warm up and regain some autonomy.
Even so, they remembered in Forbes What is most striking is the obstinacy of normality: businesses operating with generatorsneighborhoods that resist in the dark, families improvising routines and a society that, instead of becoming anesthetized, tangibly feels again what it means to sustain a country at war when the temperature turns each blackout into a physical threat.
Air saturation. Russian pressure is not only more constant, it is also more massive, and its strength resides in the volume: The number of attack drones has escalated to exceed 5,000 a monthwhich is equivalent to more than 150 every nighta figure designed to deplete defenses and force Ukraine to choose what saves and what doesn’t. Although the interception rate stays highthe strategic cost is enormous because shooting down swarms with surface-to-air missiles or aviation weapons consumes scarce and very expensive resources at an unsustainable speed.
Zelensky himself has warned that there are systems that run out of ammunition. Mobile teams with autocannons and machine guns provide useful and relatively cheap defense, but its scope is limited and they can only protect specific points, such as a power plant, leaving too many gaps for an enemy who strikes and repeats the pattern every night. In that equation, the “thermal terror” It does not depend on destroying everything, but on having enough impacts so that the system does not raise its head and the population can’t rest.
The kamikaze “hunters”. The Ukrainian response is coming through a route more adapted to this new mass war: interceptor drones small, fast and cheapconceived like disposable hunters capable of taking down Shaheds from a distance without burning a missile for each target. They are a evolution of the FPV ecosystembut oriented towards pure performance, with “bullet” type designs and industrial logic looking for volume: different models, several suppliers, accelerated production and a cost per unit that allows you to take risks without mortgaging the arsenal.
Its effectiveness is maximized by launching more than one per whitejust as is done with expensive interceptors when the priority is to ensure the downing before the drone reaches a substation or thermal plant, which requires manufacturing many more interceptors than enemy drones.
Aid. And yet, what seemed impossible a few months ago is beginning to sound viable: manufacturing has been triggered and, with allied supportUkraine is reaching a scale that It is no longer symbolicbut operational, to the point that interceptors are becoming protagonists of night demolitions and claiming a growing share of the work that previously fell on missiles.
Hold on until March. The strategic sense of these interceptors is not only to shoot down drones, but to open a window of timebecause Ukraine will not be able to rebuild or stabilize its energy network as long as it continues receiving daily blows on the same critical points. The winter war is decided, therefore, in the ability to reduce the impact leak enough to repair without the repair being destroyed the next day, and in maintaining morale when the cold punishes as much as the enemy.
Russia bets on fatigue and despairwhile Ukraine does it for a defense cheaper and massive that allows it to resist the peak of winter demand and reach the temperate spring season with the system alive.
If the Russian plan is to push a country into a dark age of ice and blackouts, the Ukrainian response is to build, urgently and with war engineering, an aerial barrier made of kamikaze hunters that not only protect transformers, but buy something much more valuable: time not to break (or freeze).
Image | Denys Shmyhal
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