Russia Begins To Systematically Destroy The Ukrainian Power Grid

Without going into whether Russia should have done this and more at the outset, and whether delaying only gets more people killed, it is worth noting that it is not just the West that cares nothing for Ukrainian lives.

The Ukrainian leadership also sees its citizens as sheep to be sheared or fleeced and slaughtered, as long as the goodies keep flowing.

IMO, this (systematic attacks on generation & transmission of electricity in Ukraine) is a response to recent attacks by Ukraine inside [pre-war] Russian territory. There have been several reports of Ukrainian attacks on Russian energy and transportation systems in the last several months; Russia will show Ukraine that it will suffer terribly if it continues those attacks.

Russia made a few hits on Ukrainian grid nodes a year or so ago, but that was more like warning shots than a concerted attempt to destroy the grid. For the sake of the people who depend on that grid, I’m glad that Russia waited as long as it did (guessing that Spring is kicking in there, so freezing to death is less likely now?)

Assuming that Russian media have been encouraged/forced to censor news of successful Ukrainian attacks on infrastructure inside Russia, I’d also suggest that Putin is blaming the Crocus attack on Ukraine as a way to maintain internal political support for the new strategic bombing campaign (which was surely being planned long before the terrorist attack).

A long time back, I hypothesized that a subtext to Russian attacks on electrical infrastructure had to do with the Russian monopoly on the equipment (meeting Russian/Soviet electrical system standards) to repair and restore it. The hydroelectric and flood control systems on the Dneiper are also an interesting factor for any Russian planning for “the endgame”.

The “mysterious” destruction of the Kakhovka Dam a while back was a prime example of the information vacuum at work as neither side would take responsibility, either for deliberate destruction or negligence, so it wasn’t clear if it was back luck or malevolence, or whose malevolence. A civil engineering “fan boy” I sometimes follow opined that the enormous cost of such a dam would tend to point the finger in the direction of whichever party did not expect to be responsible at the end of the war for replacing the thing. A variety of circumstances suggest that the territories Russia claims need the Kakhovka. The left bank for a good stretch becomes a swamp without it. The left bank is adjacent to the only desert in Europe, one of the world’s smallest, which is contained by generous use of water. Crimea, too, relies on diverted water.

That was a long-winded way of saying I think Russia needs the Right bank, at least from Zaporizhzhia to Nikolaev (aka Mykolaiv). I don’t know how they can get it with the forces the Russians have, unless and until Ukraine simply collapses, which looks possible.

There’s some cavalier talk of “Russian majority” areas. Crimea certainly has a Russian-speaking majority, but I don’t think that the other areas of Eastern Ukraine were overwhelmingly Russian, say, ten years ago or even earlier. Way back and traditionally, cities yes, rural no. The whole of eastern Ukraine, I imagine, is thoroughly depopulated of all but its oldest residents now, not that there were many young. There is a huge demographic deficit left over from the troubles of the late 1990s in both Russia and Ukraine, but Ukraine did not recover as Russia did in the early years of Putin. The “Donbass” experienced some of the worst social decay anywhere, with suicide by alcoholism at very high rates. This is a society that was devastated even before it was devastated. For a very long time, it seemed like Russia did not want to take on the burden of such a seriously depressed rust belt and now it is even more depressed and devastated. The political problem of how to re-populate and re-industrialize this “new Russia” (to revive Potemkin’s ambitious name for his conquest) is a part of the endgame.

If this was truly in retaliation for the Moscow concert attacks, it would be a potential indicator that Moscow knew in advance. The initial shots of the campaign were fired the same night the attacks occurred. Given the lead time require to program the involved systems, they would have been prepping the targeting data for at least 24 hours in advance…. They could execute standard routes, but with mobile defences one tries to leave this as late as one can.

I don’t think this is at all likely – some combination of forcing the Ukrainians to expend resources and deterring further attacks on oil infrastructure strikes me as a lot more plausible. While Russian production is curtailed to support prices, these attacks would be highly concerning.

NR: Of course, it should be pointed out that there is absolutely no evidence that Ukraine or any Western country funded the ISIS-K terror attack in Russia.

Why should it be pointed out? Seriously, we never seem to “know” anything, because most of the relevant evidence is hidden from the public by spy agencies, which float lies in place to further confuse matters.

What seems to me worthy of remark are the number of seemingly reasonable people who immediately suspect the U.S. government. I am not saying there is evidence in a conventional sense — there clearly isn’t! What I am saying is that the history of lies combined with suppression / censorship / disinformation has created an information vacuum that is sucking in belief, beliefs that are generated in the absence of reliable evidence.

In circumstances in which “objective” information is available, people can operate on the basis of a consensus “shared” reality, and absence of evidence — the dog that didn’t bark — can be persuasive evidence in itself. But we do not live in such a world.

It is hugely consequential politically. No reasonable person can simply reject a priori U.S. covert involvement. The U.S. warned the Russians, without of course sharing any operational, actionable intelligence and the most reasonable surmise is the U.S. knew of the plot because they instigated it. Because that is what they do.

Is it “fair” to reason that way about a government of murderous war-mongering thugs? You wouldn’t worry about imputing novichok motives to Putin; why cut Biden any more slack? Or do you think a girl and five guys in a rented sailboat blew up Nordstream?

the most reasonable surmise is the U.S. knew of the plot because they instigated it.

Really? This is the most reasonable surmise? Then what, pray tell, is the answer to the obvious question: If the U.S. instigated the terrorist attack, why would they warn Russia about it beforehand? Why would they go to the trouble of preparing a terrorist attack, only to then do something that would increase Russia’s chances of stopping it? Were they banking on Putin’s arrogance and expecting that he would ignore the warning, as he did? There’s no way they could have known that for sure, and if the goal was a successful terrorist attack, that was an unnecessary risk. Much better to simply say nothing at all.

I will also point out that ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack, and after Putin tried to blame Ukraine, they put out a second statement with photo evidence that they did it. And then, after Russia tried to discredit their photo evidence, they put out a third statement with literal bodycam footage of the attack. The attempt to blame Ukraine or the West in general is honestly surreal at this point.

It’s worth noting that there wasn’t actually any attack on the days that the U.S. made the warning for: March 8th and 9th (https://ru.usembassy.gov/security-alert-avoid-large-gatherings-over-the-next-48-hours/). The Crocus Attack happened on the 22nd.

Z

If the U.S. instigated the terrorist attack, why would they warn Russia about it beforehand? Why would they go to the trouble of preparing a terrorist attack, only to then do something that would increase Russia’s chances of stopping it?

They conspicuously warned Russia without actually telling the Russians anything that would help the Russians prevent it. So, they did not want to stop it. They wanted to seem plausibly innocent even as they prepared to instantly push a narrative into the media after the horrific incident happened.

The actual perpetrators have been captured. The hopelessly “incompetent” Russian police services have sufficient fire discipline to prevent suicide-by-cop from destroying evidence. And, they searched the road to Tajikistan? to Khorasan? No. The Russians looked in the direction of . . . wait for it . . . Ukraine. And, voila!

The actual perpetrators were suspiciously NOT ISIS religiously inspired true believers seeking martyrdom. They were mercenaries. Who conveniently did meet or know their sponsors / handlers. Their handlers could be any CIA cutout with a Telegram channel. So absolutely ISIS-K! And, ISIS-K are who exactly? What is their grievance? What is their provenance? It all gets pretty murky.

My point is that I do not know and neither do you. This is all speculation in a vacuum. Largely groundless and mostly unconstrained by any objective facts. What seems superficially plausible to you has no claim on the truth of objective reality and that makes your favored “narrative” derived from that speculation nothing more than a logo on a team jersey you wear to watch your team on the teevee.

The vacuum is created.

That is my second point.

The vacuum is policy and a consequence of institutions decaying or destroyed.

It would be really helpful to have a skeptical news media with skilled journalists digging in. But we don’t. It would be helpful to have experts. (We have the likes of Timothy Snyder, Levin Professor of History at Yale University instead, opining on whether NBC should have hired Miss Ronna.) It would be helpful to have government agencies guarding their own integrity and credibility as precious assets, but we don’t. “Credibility” is a debased coinage on the verge of hyperinflation.

The vacuum sucks people — you and I included — variously into wild speculation, paranoia, cynicism, apathy, psychotic conspiracy theories, and furious but misdirected partisanship.

The Crocus City Hall terror incident was horrific. The Russians may choose to blame Ukraine and the U.S. just as George W Bush and Company blamed Saddam Hussein for 9/11 and non-existent WMD.

I don’t know which is scarier: that this is the state of our politics or that the Russians might be right where Bush was simply lying.

There is no evidence America supports Israel committing genocide.

Um, what? There is a lot of evidence of this, just as there is evidence of many of the other things you listed (Iran-Contra for example).

It’s quite fascinating to me how flexible these “information vacuums” are. Everything is hidden from us by intelligence agencies except – apparently – the content of back channel inter-agency communications, which allows us to assess with confidence that the US IC gave the Russians nothing actionable that would allow them to stop the attack.

My Google-Fu has failed me.

I cannot find, beyond references several years old, any map or description of territories and resources remaining to ISIS, let alone to any reference to ISIS-K.

I would assume they control a couple of villages in the Mad Max inspired eastern wastelands of Syria, maybe?

Their beef with Russia, such that they would expend such resources as to stage an attack a good part of a continent away is… What, exactly? Supporting Assad? Acting as an accidental buffer between them and US mercs holding much of Syrian territory? Avenge some distant cousin’s death in the all but forgotten Chechen war?

There does not seem to even be an illogical reason for this attack on the part of some “ISIS” variant.

I recall reading, years ago and long before 9/11, a cartoon where Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda had become the modern Emmanuel Goldstein and The Brotherhood.

Ah yes, Ted Rall’s “2024: A Graphic Novel,” published prophetically May 1, 2001.

Well, Osama is dead, so we get the next best, also ran “Global Boogeyman,” the ever-living undead “ISIS,” now in every flavor of the alphabet, including Greek if need be…

Waiting for a copy of a check written out to the terrorists and signed by War Pimp Zelensky to be drawn from the Ukraine Central Bank with For Crocus Attack on 3/22 on the bottom left hand corner of it and, of course, War Pimp Zelensky’s tearful admission that he indeed wrote the check before I form an opinion on the matter …

Z

GrimJim:

Their beef with Russia, such that they would expend such resources as to stage an attack a good part of a continent away is… What, exactly?

Try this article for an explanation (probably not complete, as Russia has a long history with Islamic extremists, but it hits some major points):

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/3/23/moscow-concert-hall-attack-why-is-isil-targeting

It doesn’t mean someone else was involved either. I’m saying that, based on the available evidence we have now, there is no reason to conclude anyone else was involved. Sure, it’s possible that evidence will emerge showing that others were involved–but there are a lot of things that *might* happen in the future, and you can’t draw conclusions based on “might.”

And also, there is a good deal of misinformation out there now, like “they were mercenaries” (we don’t know this) and “ISIS had no reason to attack Russia” (they did, and they have in the past).

Given the above amply demonstrated human reflex to fill informational voids with whatever assumption billed as chain of inference best supports one’s desired conclusion at any given moment, I would suggest that the problem is not informational vacuum but instead a pervasively super-saturated informational environment, without interpretational frameworks and procedures that allow one to make sense of it.

The analytical art is reaching into the datastream and picking out the right handful of pertinent datapoints that allow one to make sense of it all. If assumption is doing a lot of heavy lifting to “reveal the unrevealed” without a lot of testing, be wary.

None of the info from wikipedia about the 1999 Russian apartment buildings cited above moves me much. Neither do I consider wikipedia to be 100% accurate, of course, though I’ll say that I believe they are pretty accurate for the most part and they are a more reliable purveyor of the facts and give differing opinions on matters a fairer shake than our rulers’ statestream media. But how reliable can you consider the sources of this info you have provided from an incident in Russia back in 1999 when in 2003 we saw the NYZ Times, the Grey Jezebel, our rulers’ paper of propaganda, cite very thinly and questionably sourced “info” that they used to manufacture falsehoods to justify attacking Iraq?

Could Putin have done what you claimed? Sure, it’s well within the realm of possibility and I certainly wouldn’t be shocked if it was true, and one can see that he may have had motivation to do so. In fact, I used to believe that it was literally undeniable that Putin ordered these bombings particularly because of the timing of them, but now, taking into account that our rulers also had incentives to want Russia at war with Chechnya and their stated objectives to balkanize Russia into smaller, more corruptible and less powerful pieces, I question that belief. Especially when you consider all that was at stake back then: control of Russia, which rested firmly in Russian oligarchs at that time (the decided majority of them of Jewish descent) who very much had had their way with Yeltsin, and who was going to replace Yeltsin.

Like I said: I once foolishly accepted what you believe about those bombings as fact. But those were the pre-twitter days, and before the mass proliferation of cellphones with cameras, so there was a lot less on-the-ground info available to us back then and the narrative was much less contested.

Z

. . . the problem is not informational vacuum but instead a pervasively super-saturated informational environment, without interpretational frameworks and procedures that allow one to make sense of it.

“instead”? or also?

certainly there are few reliable filters. and, indeed, the audience may not be paying enough attention — may be like the animals in a Gary Larson cartoon listening to people, picking up only tone or a key word.

NR referred me to the Wikipedia article on the case of the apartment bombings across Russian cities, which I faithfully read. Even pre-digested like that, it is a lot to take in and sort out. Apparently several people have been obsessed enough to write books, which are cited in the article.

In defense of my “vacuum” hypothesis, the secrecy imposed by security services in Russia and intelligence agencies abroad have left journalists with limited hard evidence. Certainly, there is little beyond the secrecy itself to support the more lurid and sensational charges leveled at Putin. Several authors have gone the level-headed judgment route and attacked not the evidentiary basis for characterizing it as a black flag operation (since there isn’t much) but have considered plausibility in context, questioning the premises of the “conspiracy theories”.

Does plausibility-in-context balanced judgment work to overcome the absence of reliable, verified data? It doesn’t settle many arguments ultimately, because in the absence of an abundance of objective facts, it falls back on solipsistic techniques of reasoning and cultural norms in my experience.

Politics is always going to be a mind space contested by narrative. The narrative of Putin as deeply sinister figure furthering his ambition by cynical and manipulative use of horrific events isn’t that far afield from speculating that he may have had a hand in initiating the horrific events. The latter narrative has a sharper cutting edge, but is extended beyond any foundation in publicly known fact, imho. NR wants to convict Putin of perpetrating a black flag operation. I don’t see it. But, it is a political contest of moral narratives and objectively, Putin did leverage the opportunity to make himself President and to make the RF Presidency supremely powerful as well as to subvert Chechnya.

I have deep ambivalence about Putin, especially in his recent casting into his recent role on the global stage as champion of the multipolar world against the decadent neoliberal hegemon. In countering what I regard as a gratuitously false narrative, I feel the pressure to characterize Putin more positive terms than I think would accurate.

I’ll simply say that there is a lot more evidence pointing to Putin being behind the 1999 Russian apartment bombings than there is pointing to Ukraine or any Western country being behind the recent Moscow terror attack.

Well, thank you for weighing it up for us. What do you estimate? 34 kilograms more? That about the size of it, you reckon?

Well I’ll simply say that there is a lot more evidence pointing to Putin being behind the 1999 Russian apartment bombings than there is pointing to Ukraine or any Western country being behind the recent Moscow terror attack.

How can you possibly weigh “evidence” when you don’t know the credibility of the sources of it? How do you know that a lot of the “evidence” critical of Putin in the 1999 Russian apartment bombings isn’t just Billy Browder’s bs? In fact, some of the info in the wiki entry most critical of Putin comes from Amy Knight.

Amy Knight‘s “Russia’s Magnitsky affair and how it comes closer to Donald Trump” in the New York Review of Books Feb 22, 2018, is so full of egregious errors of fact, that I shall just start at the beginning, and link to evidence proving either bad faith or bad journalism. Essentially, Knight here is not a reporter, she is William Browder‘s stenographer.

https://www.thekomisarscoop.com/2018/02/ny-review-of-books-fake-news-on-browdermagnitksy-story/

There’s plenty of reason to be skeptical of anyone who uncritically uses Browder as a source.

https://www.thekomisarscoop.com/category/thebrowderhoax/

Z

There are 238 citations in that Wikipedia article and Amy Knight is mentioned in exactly 4 of them. And there are many other sources saying the same, or similar, things that she does in any case.

Attempts at an independent investigation have faced obstruction by Russian government. State Duma deputy Yuri Shchekochikhin filed two motions for a parliamentary investigation of the events, but the motions were rejected by the State Duma in March 2000. An independent public commission to investigate the bombings was chaired by Duma deputy Sergei Kovalev. The commission was rendered ineffective because of government refusal to respond to its inquiries. Two key members of the Kovalev Commission, Sergei Yushenkov and Yuri Shchekochikhin, have since died in apparent assassinations. The Commission’s lawyer and investigator Mikhail Trepashkin was arrested and served four years in prison “for revealing state secrets”. Former FSB agent Alexander Litvinenko, who described in his books how FSB committed these bombings, was assassinated by the FSB in London in 2006.

But yes, I’m sure all of that is just a giant coincidence and Putin is innocent of any wrongdoing. Only the Gospel According to Putin is the truth and nothing else is to be believed. I eagerly await my next chance to hear the Holy Word!

It’s entirely credible that the apartment bombings were a false flag. One can argue against, but there is evidence for.

You can argue for or against, precisely there isn’t that much objective evidence. The arguments for or against become exercises in interpretation of meaning, trying to find a plausible consistency makes sense of known facts in the absence of a sufficient density of factual circumstance and context.

There are a bunch of ways you can go in constructing an interpretive argument. You can go straight for narrative: Putin is a “good guy” or at least a kind of patriot with some ethical limits built into his patriotism is one premise; Putin is evil and ruthless and supremely manipulative is an alternative way to bootstrap a narrative. Were those FSB agents caught planting a bomb part of a larger operation that planted all the bombs? Or, were they the hapless minions of an agency trying to salvage its reputation by planting a bomb it could heroically “discover”? What was going on with the Speaker who reported in the past-tense a bombing that didn’t take place for three more days? Were the bombings about Chechnya or Dagestan? Does the fact that Putin would use the bombing against Chechnya imply that he instigated the bombing? Things were pretty desperate in and for the Russian state at the time. Maybe Putin the evil Patriot did what he thought he had to do to galvanize the state to action, to restore the health of the state with the most reliable tonic for states, war. It is a morally thrilling narrative, but can anyone reconcile the fumbling FSB with a supremely competent FSB that could keep such a secret about an operation sprawling across several cities?

I know I don’t know enough to sort it out or to choose the trustworthy from among those who might be able to sort it out. Maybe secrecy has obscured so much that it simple cannot be sorted out — isn’t that the point of state secrecy, after all? To cover the evil done with a shroud of “complexity” as Willy put it?