Introductory annotation by Patrice Greanville, editor of the Greanville Post:

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Monday people were killed and injured in multiple missile strikes on cities across Ukraine, including the first bombardment of the capital in months. CBS News senior foreign correspondent Charlie D’Agata1 said the strikes, which could signal a major escalation in the eight-month-old war, appeared to be entirely punitive — retaliation meant to terrorize Ukrainian civilians2 in densely-populated urban neighborhoods, close to government buildings, with one even hitting a children’s playground.
 
Ukraine’s national police later said at least 10 people were killed and about 60 others injured by the missile strikes early Monday morning.

 Russia’s strongman leader Vladimir Putin acknowledged the barrage of missiles, which Russia claimed targeted only energy infrastructure, was retaliation for an apparent Ukrainian attack on a key bridge over the weekend. Putin warned Monday that if Ukraine continued to mount “terrorist attacks” on Russia, his regime’s response would be “tough and proportionate to the level of threats.”
 
“Unfortunately there are dead and wounded. Please do not leave the shelters,” Zelenskyy told Ukraine’s citizens on social media earlier Monday, accusing Russia of wanting to “wipe us from the face of the Earth.”

The explosions in Kyiv and other cities came just a day after Putin blamed Kyiv for a massive explosion on a 12-mile bridge connecting Crimea with Russia. Crimea is a large Ukrainian peninsula that Russia occupied and then unilaterally annexed eight years ago during a previous invasion. The annexation of that territory, like Putin’s recent land grab3 of four Ukrainian regions that he declared Russian soil last week, have been condemned as illegitimate and illegal by Ukraine, the United Nations, the U.S. and other Ukrainian partners.

The CBS report could not avoid calling the attack a “war crime”, standard appellation for anything done by Russia and Putin in this conflict. They conveniently forget that it is US military doctrine (seen repeatedly in recent Gulf wars, etc.) to attack electricity power grids on the very first day of the onslaught, immediately condemning the country to severe stress due to lack of running water, heat, and the multitude of vital activities that electricity permits in modern society. (See more on this in our attached John Helmer report).The CBS report however grudgingly admitted that Moscow had apparently accomplished its purpose:

As the European Union condemned Russia’s attack and said the targeting of civilians amounted to “a war crime,” Russia’s Defense Ministry confirmed the “massive strike with long-range precision weapons.” It claimed the missiles had targeted “objects of the military command and control, communications and energy systems of Ukraine” and that “all assigned objects were hit.”

(CBS/AFP News, Oct 10, 2022)

Meantime, Kiev, who, like the West, places great stock on the wiles of hybrid war, virtually acknowledged its hand in the terrorist strike on the Crimea bridge by circulating a stamp that gloated over the incident. The stamp appeared almost immediately after the bridge was blown up.

By John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with

In the propaganda war the Ukrainian-supplied western media, led by Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers, have just announced the discovery of a box of gold teeth “in a suspected [sic] Russian torture chamber, prompting claims [sic] they were wrenched from victims [sic] of President Putin’s occupying forces in Kharkov [sic].”

They are concealing that the Ukrainians of Kharkov whose teeth are fully intact inside their mouths can no longer operate their electric toothbrushes. There’s no electricity. Not for torture. Just enough for the allegations to be fabricated, published, and transmitted on the internet.

According to Ukrainian sources, about 1,700 cities, towns and villages, with about 1 million consumers, were without power in mid-March; the most seriously affected were the regions of  Sumy, Chernigov, Nikolaev and Donetsk. On May 3, Ukrainian and western media reported a missile strike against power plants in the western Galicia region capital of Lvov; sub-stations supplying electricity to the railway system in the region were also hit.  The biggest of the Russian attacks on Ukrainian electricity plants was reported in the western press, again quoting Kiev sources, on September 11-12.  Power plants in Kharkov, Sumy, Poltava and Dnipropetrovsk regions were stopped.

A report by the International Energy Agency (IEA), issued on October 6, confirms there was a sharp fall in consumer demand for electricity following these attacks; this appears as a gap in the data chart between September 11 and 13. Kiev officials claimthat the generating plants were  repaired and power restored.   The IEA report,  which relies upon and repeats data provided by the state utility Ukrenergo,  claims that just before the Russian strikes,  demand was running at 9.07 GW on Saturday, September 10, and that by the following Tuesday it was 13.56 GW.

According to the IEA, “Ukraine’s electricity demand has fallen by about 40% since Russia’s invasion with no sign of recovery. Demand keeps decreasing slowly every week. The resulting decline in power generation has mainly taken place in nuclear. But coal-fired generation has also decreased.”  An IEA chart of power generation figures shows that from a peak of 21.87 GW on January 25, the production of electricity reported on October 5 had fallen to 11.41 GW – a cut of 48%.
 
However, the same IEA report claims that since a low point was reached on June 26 of 9.13 GW, Ukrenergo has also been managing to restore output by 25%.
 
A North American military specialist in infrastructure demolition and salvage, now retired, says these data are being faked by Ukrenergo. “The Russian strikes also interrupt data recording and reporting. The Ukrainians are not too keen to show weakness as they are anxious to be seen as a reliable supplier of electricity.”
 
Slowly but surely, but also secretly, the war is destroying the electric generation on which the Ukraine depends for everything –  trains, water pumps, sewage treatment, light, heat, mobile telephones, refrigerators, radio and television, not to mention production lines in factories, in abattoirs,  sausage making and other farm and food processing.
 
However, there remains electricity for the Ukrainian military operations to continue on the eastern front, and for cross-border trains to run into Lvov from Poland with fresh arms,  ammunition, and rotating allied military staff advisers, together with NATO politicians and journalists keen to advertise their support.
 
In the wake of the attack on the Crimean Bridge, the electric war can now be expected to escalate.

In this Ukrainian report of March 2022,   the “base installed generating capacity” of the country was reported at 56 GW at 2020 —  64% from thermal power plants, 25% nuclear and 10% hydro. The remaining 1%, offset by some hydro storage, was accounted for by solar, wind and other small generators.