WASHINGTON DC – Russia’s missiles are not meant to win the war on the battlefield. They are meant to win it in the dark, according to Ambassador John Herbst, a former US envoy to Ukraine.
Herbst, who currently serves as the senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, on Friday moderated a forum on Moscow’s winter campaign against Ukrainian civilians.
The recent Russian strikes on Ukraine’s energy sites, he said, are “not incidental to the war” but instead represent “Putin’s savage strategy” – a deliberate campaign of war crimes designed to achieve by terror what Russian forces have failed to secure militarily.
Four winters into the full-scale invasion, the evidence is mounting. Power plants lie in ruins. Cities endure day-long blackouts. Nuclear facilities sit under occupation. And yet, Ukraine remains unbroken.
Strategy built on cold, darkness
Russia’s energy war has evolved, but its logic has not.
Yulia Burmistenko, head of international affairs at DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy company, described a methodical campaign that began with attacks on transmission grids and has since expanded to power generation, gas production, and thermal and hydroelectric plants.
“The tactics change,” Burmistenko said. “The goal stays the same: to break the will of the Ukrainian nation.”
In the past three months alone, DTEK facilities have been hit seven times in combined drone and missile strikes.
Every major power plant in Ukraine has been attacked–many repeatedly. Blackouts now stretch 20 to 24 hours a day in some regions, with heating systems failing at the height of the coldest winter since the invasion began.
Energy workers, Burmistenko noted, often restore electricity to neighborhoods while living without power themselves.
“This is the frontline,” she said.
Why Kremlin keeps escalating
For Moscow, energy infrastructure has become the pressure point of choice.
Suriya Jayanti, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, argued the campaign reflects a consistent Russian theory of victory: make Ukraine unlivable, and political collapse will follow.
“Beat it, starve it, or freeze it into submission,” Jayanti said.
By current estimates, more than 65 percent of Ukraine’s power generation capacity has been damaged or destroyed. Thermal power plants have been systematically targeted. Nuclear facilities now account for roughly 60 percent of electricity generation–not because output has grown, but because everything else has been knocked out.
Yet the Kremlin’s bet has not paid off.
“Ukraine has not conceded. It has not collapsed,” Jayanti said. “It is cold. It is dark. But it is still fighting–and still rebuilding.”
Ukraine has also taken the energy fight back to Russia, launching precision drone strikes against refineries and export infrastructure that underpin Moscow’s war economy.
“Nobody is winning,” Jayanti said. “But Russia is not winning either.”
Nuclear wild card
The most dangerous front in Russia’s energy war may be the one it dares Ukraine not to fight back.
Ivan Fedorov, head of the Zaporizhzhia Regional State Administration, warned that Russia’s occupation of Europe’s largest nuclear power plant has turned the facility into a military shield–and a potential catastrophe.
Russian forces, he said, store weapons and equipment on-site, fully aware that Ukrainian troops will not return fire on a nuclear installation. International monitors remain severely restricted, unable to access large portions of the plant.
“No one can guarantee safety there,” Fedorov said. “Russia alone controls what happens.”
Ukrainian intelligence has recently warned of possible Russian plans to disrupt grid access to the country’s remaining nuclear plants–a move that could threaten cooling systems and risk disaster.
Humanitarian crisis in real time
The impact on civilians is no longer abstract.
More than four million Ukrainians are now living in dire humanitarian conditions, according to the United Nations, with millions more on the brink.
Pipes are bursting in apartment buildings. Water systems are failing. Entire districts of Kyiv have gone days without heat or electricity.
One recent case cited at the forum underscored the toll: a 100-year-old Ukrainian Holocaust survivor froze to death in her home during a blackout.
Oksana Nechyporenko, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, said the psychological strain is becoming as dangerous as the physical damage.
“Mental health is our internal air defense,” she said.
Depression and exhaustion are widespread, she added, particularly among children. Years of pandemic disruption followed by war have produced severe educational losses–up to two years in some regions–compounding the long-term damage to Ukraine’s social fabric.
“This is not only about infrastructure,” Nechyporenko said. “It is about Ukraine’s future.”
Ceasefire that isn’t
As Ukraine searches for relief, questions are growing in Washington about what comes next.
President Donald Trump has floated the idea of an energy ceasefire–an initiative Ukrainian leaders have publicly welcomed. But panelists expressed deep skepticism that Russia has agreed, or would comply.
“It would require the Kremlin to admit Ukraine has successfully struck Russian energy infrastructure,” Jayanti said. “That’s an inconvenient truth Putin has spent years trying to suppress.”
Meanwhile, roughly $250 million in previously allocated U.S. energy assistance remains undelivered–funds that Ukrainian officials say could meaningfully reduce power shortages if released.
Europe has stepped up with emergency financing and generators, but critical equipment like high-voltage transformers can take years to replace.
Putin’s Miscalculation
As Ambassador Herbst framed it, the stakes are now unmistakable. “These strikes are not collateral damage,” he said. “They are Putin’s strategy.”
A strategy built on darkness, cold, and civilian suffering.
A strategy that has killed innocents, hollowed out cities, and brought Ukraine to the edge of humanitarian catastrophe.
But it is also a strategy that – four winters in – has still failed to deliver Moscow the victory it seeks.
Ukraine is battered and exhausted, but it remains the one variable Putin hasn’t been able to solve for.
As the lights flicker in Kyiv, the calculation in Washington is shifting: if a winter of darkness couldn’t break the Ukrainian line, a strategy built on freezing out civilians may end up being the Kremlin’s most expensive misfire yet.