Analysts say Russia’s push to choke off fuel routes and seize the town of Kostiantynivka could redraw both the military map in the east and the economic map across the whole region.
Tomáš Vasilko
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The headline of today’s battlefield update may at first seem inappropriate. Russia has been waging total war against Ukraine since February 2022, regularly attacking targets in cities that include not only military infrastructure, but also energy and civilian infrastructure.
Nevertheless, it appears that in recent weeks Russia has further escalated its attacks on civilian infrastructure. This is probably a response to Ukrainian strikes on refineries and other targets inside the Russian Federation.
And while ordinary Russians are beginning to feel the war in their own cities for the first time, conditions are also worsening for civilians living in unoccupied Ukraine.
“We are entering a total war, and that is a major problem. Both we and they will have enough missiles and drones to systematically destroy each other’s economies. As for ordinary daily life, very difficult times lie ahead,” former Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba said in a video last week.
He added, for example, that apart from the start of the invasion, Ukraine had not faced shortages of goods in shops and supermarket prices had remained more or less stable. “There will now be disruptions [to supplies of goods], because everything will be destroyed and flooded,” he said.
He later explained that he did not mean there would be food shortages, but rather that he was referring to imported goods.
For example, over the past three weeks Russia has fired almost 200 missiles at the port of Odessa and its surroundings, and exports effectively ceased for at least one week. According to the Ukrainian account Oko Hora, foreign merchant ships stopped calling at Ukrainian ports.
“Ports and logistics hubs are now being destroyed on both sides — this is total economic warfare,” Kuleba said.
