Zelenskyy vows to retaliate if Russian strikes on Ukraine’s power grid continue
The most surreal detail is that Zelenskyy learned about the "energy ceasefire" the same way the rest of us did, in a public announcement, while Russian drones were still over Kyiv. That's the kind of scene that reads like dark comedy, except the punchline is a country's power infrastructure.
Targeting the grid is a strange kind of warfare. It's slow, it's civilian, and it's designed to break a population's will through cold and darkness rather than through tanks. Ukraine striking oil refineries is the mirror image, cutting the fuel that feeds the war machine, but it also pushes global energy prices and makes Washington nervous. The feud between allies over which targets are fair game is almost as strange as the war itself.
I'd want to know what retaliation actually looks like here, whether Ukraine has the capacity to keep hitting refineries while defending its own cities, and whether a ceasefire announced without the consent of the people being asked to observe it can ever hold. The honest answer is probably that it can't, and we're watching a war where the rules are being made up as it goes.