On November 20, it will be 1,000 days since Vladimir Putin’s regime unleashed its expanded onslaught in Ukraine. That’s 1,000 times that leaders of global democracies could have taken more decisive steps to ensure Ukrainian victory.
It is 1,000 times too that Western leaders could have provisioned Kyiv to combat Moscow’s strikes against Ukrainian energy systems. As the third winter season since Russia expanded its 2014 assault on Ukrainian sovereignty approaches, there are no more days for dithering.
The West must urgently do everything possible to support Ukraine’s air defense and long-range strike capability before the winter so the Kremlin can’t further expand the humanitarian nightmare it has already caused.
The campaign against Ukraine’s civil energy infrastructure epitomizes the Kremlin’s longstanding weaponization of energy across Europe. Assaults have included security of supply threats, supply cuts (as in 2006 and 2009), monopolistic practices, disinformation, and the corruption and capture of elites — tactics now joined by the overt kinetic destruction of energy systems in Ukraine and covert sabotage attacks by Russia, or Russia-recruited individuals, against energy and critical infrastructure across the continent.
These actions are the logical culmination of Russian energy doctrine and result from insufficient action by the Transatlantic community to counter Russian energy weaponization, especially over the past decade.
Two-and-a-half years of near-constant infrastructure bombing has resulted in an appalling level of energy destruction in Ukraine. Its aims are simply depraved. The attacks are designed to worsen the already dire humanitarian nightmare as grid intermittency continues to limit heating and critical infrastructure, and energy poverty becomes endemic.
Half of Ukrainian peak-winter electrical generating capacity has been hit by Russian strikes, according to the government in Kyiv, including 80% of Ukraine’s thermal power generation capacity.
Beyond humanitarian concerns, Russia’s onslaught on Ukraine’s energy system continues to throttle growth in industrial production, according to estimates reported by the Wall Street Journal, impacting its economic self-sufficiency and capacity to ramp up domestic production of military equipment and munitions.
Russia bears all responsibility for its crimes against humanity in Ukraine, including its deliberate targeting of civil energy facilities, but it is the responsibility of the US and all other democracies to help mitigate the attacks through the rapid delivery of military equipment to Ukraine, and to ensure that Putin pays a price for these crimes via robustly enforced sanctions and technology export controls — especially across the energy sector.
The Transatlantic alliance still has a considerable amount of work to do.
As a researcher, lecturer, and practitioner of European energy security, I have often been asked what the best energy security strategy for Ukraine might be during wartime. My answer has always been consistent and straightforward: air defense.
The West’s overly incrementalist and always delayed decisions on supporting weapons systems, defensive strike options and deliveries of localized air defense capabilities have left much of Ukraine’s sprawling energy landscape vulnerable to Russian strikes.
Put in mathematical terms, the policy equation of some US and European leaders and national security advisors has consistently fitted an (x – 1) equation, where x represents the defense system du jour needed to support Ukrainian defense and ultimate victory.
There have been some limited signs of movement. There are now more Patriot and other air defense systems in Ukraine than previously, and on November 12 it was reported Taiwan may be sending large numbers of older US-made Hawk systems.
But the collective support of Ukraine has been and continues to be consistently one step behind the military reality on the ground. This trend will only be exacerbated if the arguments from isolationist voices in Washington become the policy of the second Trump administration.
The cycle of incrementalist measures needs to be broken, whether on the supply of weapons urgently needed by Kyiv, or on sanctions and technology export controls.
And for those policymakers — most notably the isolationists — who still aren’t swayed by arguments to support Ukraine’s moral cause at the front lines of the struggle against revanchist authoritarianism, some simple economics: rebuilding the majority of the energy infrastructure across a country the scale of Ukraine will cost far more than sending the needed air defense equipment and allowing long-distance strikes on launch sites in Russian territory.
With political leadership set to change in the US, Germany, and many other areas of the Transatlantic space in the coming months, whether one looks at energy security support or steps to ensure ultimate Ukrainian victory, Ukraine simply can’t survive another 1,000 days of dithering.
Dr. Benjamin L. Schmitt is a Senior Fellow at the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania, a Senior Fellow for Democratic Resilience at the Center for European Policy Analysis, a fellow of the Duke University “Rethinking Diplomacy” Program, and a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations. (Twitter: @BLSchmitt).
This article has been adapted from testimony provided by Dr. Schmitt to the joint U.S. Senate and House Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (the U.S. Helsinki Commission) at a hearing entitled “Russia’s Shadow War on NATO” on 24 September 2024. A full recording of the hearing can be viewed at the U.S. Helsinki Commission website here.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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