Here is a humanized, expanded summary of the news item, shaped into six paragraphs in English.
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The latest Russian announcement about “preparing massive strikes” on Ukraine’s energy grid lands like a dark cloud over an already exhausted country. For Ukrainians, it is not a distant headline or a diplomatic abstraction; it is the sound of winter becoming more dangerous, the flicker of lights in hospitals, the hum of generators in apartment courtyards, and the ever-present fear of cold darkness creeping into homes. The Russian Defense Ministry, through the state news agency Interfax, declared it had begun preparations for a massive attack on Ukraine’s energy facilities. The stated reason—a familiar one—was that these strikes would be “in response” to Ukrainian attacks on Russian civilian and fuel-and-energy infrastructure. But for anyone who has lived through the past years of this war, this framing feels grotesque. It suggests a symmetry, a moral equivalence, that does not exist. It also obscuresomething deeper: Russia has been waging a systematic war against Ukraine’s energy infrastructure for years, long before Ukraine possessed any meaningful ability to strike back at Russian territory. This announcement is not a response; it is another chapter in a planned, deliberate strategy of breaking a nation’s will by plunging it into darkness and cold.
The timing of the announcement is carefully chosen. On August 30, Russian state media quoted the Defense Ministry as saying that the army was making preparations for these massive strikes. The language was deliberately ominous, designed to sow anxiety and to signal thatno Ukrainian counterstep would go unanswered. Russian officials often use such threats to shape the psychological atmosphere of the war, especially as Ukraine improves its long-range drone and missile capabilities. By invoking “Kyiv’s attacks on Russia’s civilian and fuel-and-energy infrastructure,” Moscow tries to position itself as the victim, claiming that every strike on its soil justifies retaliation tenfold. But this narrative conveniently forgets who started the energy war. Russia began launching cruise missiles and drones at Ukrainian power plants, substations, and heating networks in 2022, when Ukraine’s military had almost no means to reach Russian territory. Those attacks caused rolling blackouts, left millions without heating in freezing temperatures, and severely damaged every major thermal and hydroelectric facility across Ukraine. The scale and persistence of these assaults were unprecedented, and they were not improvised reactions to battlefield setbacks. They were methodical, repeated year after year, aimed not just at military targets but at the basic conditions of civilian existence.
Andrii Kovalenko, the head of the Center for Countering Disinformation at Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, immediately rejected the Russian claim. In a statement carried by LIGA.net, Kovalenko made the point that may seem obvious but still needs saying: Russia is lying. He reminded the public that Russia itself was the first to strike Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, back in 2022, and has continued doing so every year since. At the time, he recalled, Ukraine did not havethe means for deep strikes into Russian territory—no long-range ATACMS, no Storm Shadow missiles, no domestically produced drones with the range of thousand kilometers. Yet Russian missiles still rained down on Ukrainian cities, electrical substations, and pipeline networks, causing billions in damage and untold suffering. Kovalenko stressed the Russian attacks were not spontaneous reactions to Ukrainian provocations. Rather, they had been planned for a longtime. Moscow’s military planners had identified critical nodes of Ukraine’s energy system long ago and had continuously updated those plans. The claim that Russian strikes are now somehow triggered by Ukraine is a deliberate distortion, an attempt to rewrite history and make aggression look like self-defense.
Kovalenko’s central point is not just factual; it is about the nature of Russian warfare itself. Disinformation, he argued, is a weapon of war, no less real than missiles and drones. Russia regularly uses lies to shape how the world perceives its own attacks, to confuse public opinion, and to divide Ukraine from its allies. “They had been planning strikes on the energy sector for a long time,” Kovalenko said. “It is just that the Russian Federation is blurring reality with its lies. But it won’t succeed in blurring it.” The phrase “blurring reality” is striking. It captures something essential about how Moscow operates: not simply denying facts, but flooding the information space with distortions until truth becomes hazy. This is old Soviet-style “maskirovka”—military deception—refined for the digital age. The goal is to make it impossible for ordinary people, both in Russia and in the West, to know exactly what is happening, who attacked first, or who is the real aggressor. In this fog, the Russian government can present any new wave of terror against Ukraine’s energy sector as a proportionate, almost reluctant, act of retaliation, rather than what it actually is: an ongoing campaign of collective punishment against a civilian population.
This pattern of disinformation is not an isolated incident. In the days before the energy-strike announcement, Russian sources had already pushed another bizarre falsehood. On August 12, they claimed their forces had “captured”a village in the Kharkiv region—except that village had ceased to exist thirty years ago. It was a ghost settlement, perhaps nothing more than field ruins and weeds, used as propaganda fuel to create the illusion of steady territorial gains. Similarly, in early August, Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation had to publicly respond to rumors of an alleged medium-range ballistic missile threat from Iran, which appeared designed to stoke panic and undermine confidence in Ukraine’s air-defense capabilities. Each false story serves a tactical purpose: to distract from real events, to test the resilience of public trust, or to demoralize a nation already enduring constant stress. The energy-strike threat follows the same script. The goal is more than just military damage; it is also to make Ukrainians feel that every action they take—especially every successful attack on Russian soil—will bring brutal punishment. It is an attempt to install fear in the minds of ordinary people, to make them question whether Ukraine’s boldness is worth the price, and to weaken the social cohesion that has held the country together through two and a half years of full-scale war.
Yet,in the end, these manipulations reveal the weakness beneath the bluster. A state that must lie about why it bombs another country’s electric grid, that invents ghost villages and leaks Iran missile scares, is not acting from strength. It is acting from anxiety. Ukrainian officials like Kovalenko are not simply comforting their people with soothing phrases; they are naming the tactic, exposing the mechanism, and insisting that truth remains discernible. The energy strikes will likely come, as they have before, with winter approaching and Russian planners eager to inflict maximum pain. Ukrainian air-defense crews will again work around the clock; engineers will again repair damaged lines under shelling; neighbors will again huddle together in underground corridors during long nights of alerts. But the Russian effort to convince the world—and Ukrainians themselves—that all of this was somehow provoked, that it is just revenge for Ukrainian audacity, will not succeed. Because the record is clear: Russia started the energy war, Russia has continued it every year, and Russia has refined its lies to match its missiles. Ukraine did not choose this path, but it has learned to absorb blows, to adapt, and to see through the fog. And as Andrii Kovalenko said, no matter how much Russia blurs reality, the truth remains underneath—waiting to emerge.