As Ukrainian household shiver from power shortages, and Russians in Belgorod have been forced to evacuate due to Ukrainian strikes on those electricity grids, the US and Ukraine are reportedly going to meet in the UAE over the next two days to discuss an energy truce with Russia.
The Financial Times cited unnamed officials saying that a ceasefire at first limited to power grid and and other energy sources will be floated in Abu Dhabi this Friday and Saturday, during the trilateral talks, first announced by US envoy Steve Witkoff, while meeting with Kremlin officials in Russia on Thursday.
The sources who spoke to the FT all expressed reservations that such a deal would do through. Not only have Russian strikes proved crippling on the Ukrainian capital and Putin is unlikely to lost that leverage in overall peace negotiations, but also a senior Ukrainian official was quoted as saying that Kyiv’s successful drone strikes on Russia’s oil and gas facilities, and more recently, on oil tankers, are considered important defensive measures to slow down Moscow’s war machine.
The power shortages in Kyiv as a result of relentless Russian attacks has become dire.
This week it was reported that Russian strikes have left half of Kyiv without power, heating, or water, pushing the city toward a “humanitarian catastrophe,” Mayor Vitali Klitschko warned on Tuesday.
“Leave if you can,” Klitschko urged residents as emergency crews scrambled to restore services amid a cold snap with temperatures as low as –18°C (0°F). He said about 600,000 people have already fled Kyiv this month, out of a population of roughly three million.
Conversely, over this New Year holiday period, Ukrainian drone strikes had shut off power and heating in Moscow’s Ramenskoe suburb, leaving somewhere between 100,000 and 600,000 residents (a Russian internet estimate blaming Ukrainian drones and widely repeated in Ukrainian media) in a blackout for hours.
Also, last month, Ukraine reportedly launched a missile strike on Belgorod, damaging power sources.
“The shelling caused significant damage to utility infrastructure. Emergency services are working to deal with the consequences,” Belgorod Region Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov wrote on Telegram at the time.
Ukraine’s drones have also regularly blasted Russian oil supplies and tankers in an effort to de-fuel the Russian armed forces.
This is not the first time that such an energy truce has been attempted.
In March of last year, following cease fire talks in Riyadh, Ukraine and the US agreed on a list of energy facilities that Russia shouldn’t target as part of a ceasefire, although their ideas differed from those proposed by Moscow. There was a brief, week-long quell in such attacks around that period as the two sides me with the US, but drone attacks escalated soon thereafter.