REPORT: Kherson in the Dark: The Energy War Strikes Occupied Civilians

When electricity disappears under Russian occupation

On June 26, 2026, Vladimir Saldo, the governor installed by Moscow in the Kherson region, confirmed on Telegram what residents had known for hours: electricity was completely or partially cut across all of the region's Russian-controlled section, which borders Crimea. No lights. No refrigeration. No water pumps. For the thousands of civilians trapped behind the front lines, this blackout was not a technical failure — it was a new battle in a war now fought as much against infrastructure as on the battlefield.

In Sevastopol, the largest city in Crimea annexed by Russia in 2014, occupation authorities restricted electricity supply to "avoid overloading the fragile grid." That fragility is directly linked to Ukrainian drone attacks that have also triggered a fuel crisis across the peninsula. Within days, Sergei Aksyonov, Moscow's installed governor of Crimea, ordered the suspension of children's summer camps and announced a gradual reduction of train services to the peninsula.

Infrastructure destroyed over two years

The energy situation in Kherson is not new — it is the result of systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure since Ukraine's partial reconquest of the region in November 2022. Since then, the front line runs along the Dnipro: Kherson city is Ukrainian, the right bank is Russian. Civilians trapped on the Russian side — in towns like Oleshky, Hola Prystan, Nova Zburivka — have since then been living in conditions Ukraine's Foreign Ministry describes as a "severe humanitarian crisis."

In May 2026, the Kyiv Independent documented the situation in Oleshky, the occupied border town: approximately 2,000 civilians are trapped there, without drinking water, electricity, gas, or reliable food supply. The population has dropped from 24,000 to 2,000 residents — the others fled or were forcibly displaced. More than 220 direct evacuation requests have been received by Ukraine's Foreign Ministry, but Russian forces mine the roads and interrogate drivers at checkpoints.

There is something unbearable about these numbers. A city of 24,000 people reduced to 2,000 survivors, without water, light, or guaranteed food. Russia's energy war doesn't only target transformers and power plants — it targets human beings, their psychological endurance, their capacity to stay. It's a depopulation policy disguised as a military operation.

The particular situation of occupied Kherson

Occupied Kherson has a particular geography that makes it a unique case in this war. Squeezed between the left bank of the Dnipro and Crimea, this area is both militarily exposed — Ukrainian forces fire from the opposite bank — and logistically isolated, because bridges have been destroyed and supply routes are under constant pressure. Energy infrastructure, already in poor shape before the war, has been systematically struck by both sides throughout the fighting.

Before the war, the region hosted a nuclear plant at Enerhodar — the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, the largest in Europe — which remains under occupied territory but under intense international monitoring. All six reactors have been offline since 2022, depriving the region of a considerable energy source. Around the plant, thousands of workers and their families are trapped in what has become a gray zone between military occupation and industrial necessity.

Ukrainian attacks on Crimea and their cascading effects

Ukrainian drone attacks on Crimea in the weeks before June 26, 2026 produced cascading effects across the entire regional energy system. By striking fuel depots, port facilities, and military infrastructure, Ukrainian drones indirectly weakened electricity supply to civilian areas dependent on the same networks. On June 25, 2026, a Ukrainian drone killed one person in Crimea, near the crossing toward the Russian-held part of Kherson.

In Sevastopol, the electricity restriction to "avoid overload" actually reflects production and distribution capacity gravely weakened by months of Ukrainian strikes. The Russian Black Sea Fleet, decimated since 2022, was forced to relocate most of its remaining vessels to Novorossiysk — a sign that even the main naval base is no longer safe, with direct consequences for military energy priorities that spill over into the civilian sphere.

The war against energy infrastructure cuts both ways. Ukraine strikes Russian energy facilities to reduce Moscow's military capacity — that is a defensible military logic. But Ukrainian civilians under occupation also pay the price of this strategy. This is not a criticism of Kyiv — it is the brutal reality of what liberating occupied territory means.

From 24,000 to 2,000 residents: a forced exodus

The town of Oleshky, on the left bank of the Dnipro, facing Ukrainian Kherson city, has become the rawest symbol of what it means to live under Russian occupation in a front-line zone. Its population fell from 24,000 residents before the war to roughly 2,000 survivors. Those who remain are often elderly, people with limited mobility — roughly 200 children — who could not or would not leave.

A resident of Oleshky who had managed to escape in April 2026 told the Kyiv Independent: "If the situation doesn't improve, people will simply die of hunger there. Because there's no way out, no food supply coming in." Russian forces mine the roads leading to the town and interrogate drivers at checkpoints. Residents who try to buy food or flee by private car are targeted by Russian drones.

No water, no light, no future

The list of what is missing in Oleshky is staggering: no electricity, no gas, no drinking water, no guaranteed food, no safe evacuation options. Critical infrastructure is destroyed. Russian military presence is omnipresent. Ukraine's Foreign Ministry describes the situation as a "severe humanitarian crisis" caused by Russia's violation of international humanitarian law.

Of the more than 6,000 people who may need humanitarian assistance in the area — including the settlements of Hola Prystan, Stara Zburivka, and Nova Zburivka — only a few dozen have been evacuated. By May 2, 2026, approximately 30 residents had been evacuated from Oleshky. At that pace, evacuating everyone trapped would take years — years that many do not have.

Thirty people evacuated out of thousands who need it. That figure says everything about the cynicism of Russian occupation and the helplessness of humanitarian organizations facing an army that deliberately uses civilians as shields or as strategic adjustment variables. This is not a regrettable side effect of the war — it is a policy.

Russia's doctrine of striking civilian infrastructure

Since the start of the full-scale war in 2022, Russia has developed a coherent doctrine of striking Ukrainian energy infrastructure — thermal power plants, transformers, high-voltage lines, water pumping stations. This doctrine has two complementary objectives: weakening Ukraine's industrial and military capacity by cutting its electricity, and imposing unbearable psychological pressure on the civilian population to force it to flee or submit.

The ISW documented 28 strikes against Ukrainian oil infrastructure in June 2026 alone. The Vienna Institute for Energy Economics estimated at the end of 2025 that Russia had destroyed or severely damaged more than 60 percent of Ukraine's electricity production capacity since the start of the conflict. In occupied territories, this destruction is even more systematic — because the Russians are not seeking to maintain infrastructure they intend to preserve, but to empty these areas of their population.

Zaporizhzhia: the nuclear time bomb

Beyond Kherson, the situation at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant represents the gravest energy and humanitarian threat. Europe's largest nuclear plant, with its six reactors, has been under Russian occupation since March 2022. It has been offline since then, its reactors maintained in "safe cooling mode" by Ukrainian technicians under duress. The IAEA has documented dozens of incidents connected to fighting around the plant.

On June 26, 2026, Russian missiles and drones set fires in Zaporizhzhia city — the city, not the plant — causing at least 9 casualties. The city and its surroundings continue to be struck regularly, in an area where the proximity of a nuclear plant under pressure should theoretically impose at least minimal military restraint. It does not.

A nuclear plant under military occupation, within artillery range, in a war that knows no off-limits zones. If someone had described this scenario in 2021, they'd have been told they were exaggerating. And yet. The ease with which Moscow normalized using a nuclear plant as a strategic pawn will remain one of the most reckless acts of this war.

The reality of residents in the gray zones

The situation of civilians in the occupied territories of Kherson is that of people caught literally between two fires. On one side, the Russian occupation forces controlling their movements, communications, and access to food. On the other, Ukrainian strikes targeting Russian military installations but sometimes hitting inhabited areas. This double pressure creates a form of total disorientation for people who no longer know from which direction the most immediate danger is coming.

The European Parliament documented in a 2026 resolution that 2025 was "the deadliest year for civilians since the start of the full-scale invasion," with more than 2,500 civilian deaths and over 12,000 injuries — an increase of more than 30 percent compared to 2024. Since the start of the full-scale war, at least 14,534 civilian deaths have been documented by the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission, with the real number likely far higher. More than 10.8 million Ukrainians need humanitarian assistance.

The near-impossible humanitarian access in occupied zones

Humanitarian access to occupied areas is virtually nonexistent. International organizations like the ICRC have extremely limited scope in Russian-controlled territories. Russia does not permit humanitarian convoys not under the control of its occupation authorities. And those occupation authorities have no motivation to facilitate aid to Ukrainian civilians — their objective is rather to push those civilians into exile or forced assimilation.

In this context, Ukrainian evacuation initiatives from the free bank — attempting to move people through front-line corridors — are constrained by Russian military presence, mines, and direct fire. The 220 evacuation requests received by Ukraine's Foreign Ministry represent the visible portion of a far greater need. Thousands of people lack even the means to communicate their situation to the outside world.

220 evacuation requests. Every number behind that figure is a human story, a family, an elderly person alone in an apartment without light or water. I cannot write these lines without a form of anger. Not a performative anger — a real one, at the indifference with which a major power can treat civilian lives as negligible variables in a geopolitical calculation.

The logic of energy counter-warfare

Faced with Russia's energy war, Ukraine has developed its own doctrine of deep energy counter-strikes against Russian territory. By hitting oil pumping stations, refineries, and fuel depots, Ukraine seeks both to reduce resources available to the Russian military and to impose on the Russian population a visible cost of the war. The Vtorovo pumping station, struck for the second time in June 2026, represents exactly this type of target: a crucial logistics node in Russia's petroleum pipeline system.

According to the SBU (Ukrainian Security Service), the Vtorovo station is one of the key logistics hubs of Russia's petroleum products pipeline system, channeling fuel toward major depots around Moscow and toward Baltic ports for export. By striking this type of infrastructure at 700 km from the front lines, Ukraine demonstrates its capacity to wage long-range economic warfare well beyond the tactical front.

The balance sheet of the deep-strike campaign

The results of Ukraine's deep-strike campaign against Russian energy infrastructure are impressive. The ISW tallied 210 intermediate Ukrainian strikes in May 2026 and 145 in June. In May, Ukraine's General Staff confirmed 18 successful strikes against Russian oil and gas facilities — the highest monthly total of the year. In June 2026, the deep-strike campaign hit installations in the oblasts of Vladimir, Volgograd, Yaroslavl, Voronezh, Tyumen, Krasnodar, and even the Moscow refinery for the second time in a week on June 16-18.

These strikes have documented effects: restrictions on fuel sales in Russia, reduced refining capacity, pressure on the budget margins of a war economy already under strain. The Economist noted that Ukraine's deep-strike campaign had reached an unprecedented pace in June 2026, forcing Russian authorities to adopt emergency measures on fuel distribution.

There is a bitter irony in the fact that Ukraine, whose energy infrastructure is being systematically destroyed by the Russians, has developed one of the most effective long-range energy-strike capabilities in the world. Necessity is the mother of invention. And Ukraine's drone war is an adaptive response to an existential threat with no equivalent in recent history.

The precedent of winter 2024-2025

The energy war in Ukraine follows a well-established seasonal logic. Every autumn and winter, Russia intensifies strikes on Ukraine's heating, electricity, and water infrastructure to maximize the humanitarian impact on populations already exhausted. The winter of 2024-2025 was particularly brutal: targeted strikes on thermal power plants had deprived millions of Ukrainians of electricity for hours each day in freezing cold.

President Zelensky said it explicitly in his CBS News interview of May 31, 2026: the negotiating window with Russia remains open "until the next winter, when Moscow should again go after Ukraine's critical energy infrastructure." Winter is for Russia a force multiplier — below-zero temperatures turn every power cut into a lethal weapon, particularly for the elderly and vulnerable.

The race against winter 2026

Ukraine is thus in a race against the clock. Before the cold arrives — expected in October-November 2026 — it must either find a diplomatic solution allowing a ceasefire, or sufficiently reinforce its energy resilience capacity to withstand a new Russian destruction campaign. Massive investments in decentralized generators, backup heating systems, and local micro-grids represent a form of adaptation with clear limits.

In occupied territories, this race is lost in advance. The civilians of occupied Kherson, of Oleshky, of Hola Prystan, cannot benefit from Ukraine's energy resilience programs. They depend entirely on Russian occupation authorities — whose priority is the war, not the welfare of the civilian populations they control. For these populations, next winter looks as dark as the ones before.

When I think about the winter of 2026 approaching, I think about the 2,000 people of Oleshky. I think about the elderly who refused to leave because they couldn't, or because they hoped it would pass. For them, the energy war is not a geopolitical concept — it's the question of whether they will survive January. This reality must never leave our minds when we talk military strategy.

A Crimea increasingly vulnerable

Crimea has been under growing energy pressure since the autumn of 2022. The destruction of the Kerch Bridge in October 2022, followed by repeated damage, severed the main supply route from the Russian mainland. Electrical lines from the mainland are vulnerable to strikes. Fuel depots in Crimea have been struck multiple times, feeding the fuel crisis noted by occupation authorities.

For the Russian military garrison in Crimea — estimated in the tens of thousands of soldiers — these energy problems have direct operational implications. Equipment maintenance, communications, logistics: everything depends on a reliable power supply that occupation authorities are finding increasingly difficult to guarantee. The reduction in rail traffic to the peninsula affects both civilian supply and military rotations.

The Black Sea Fleet in disarray

One of the most spectacular aspects of the war at sea is the partial destruction of the Russian fleet. Ukrainian maritime drones have sunk or severely damaged multiple Russian vessels, forcing the Black Sea Fleet to relocate from Sevastopol to Novorossiysk. This naval retreat has energy consequences: the needs of Sevastopol's naval installations have changed, but the city's civilians are no less affected by the electricity restrictions imposed due to "grid overload."

In reality, this "overload" is the result of an energy infrastructure in Crimea that was never designed to support both normal civilian needs and those of a massive wartime military presence. Russia occupied Crimea in 2014 without planning for the long-term impact on the peninsula's energy infrastructure — one more example of the strategic improvisation that characterizes Russian occupation in Ukraine.

The Russian Black Sea Fleet forced to flee Sevastopol for Novorossiysk: it's a strategic defeat nobody anticipated in 2022. Ukraine's improvised maritime drones accomplished what decades of naval warfare might not have. And meanwhile, Sevastopol's civilians live with power cuts. That is the war in all its absurd complexity.

The difficulties of access to information

Covering the situation in the occupied territories of Kherson is a precarious journalistic undertaking. Direct access is virtually impossible for independent journalists — Russian occupation authorities strictly control entry into these areas. Available information comes essentially from three sources: testimonies of civilians who managed to flee, communications intercepted or posted on social media, and reports from humanitarian organizations maintaining limited contact with these populations.

The Kyiv Independent documented the testimony of an Oleshky resident who had escaped in April 2026 — a rare instance of direct information from this area. These testimonies are precious but necessarily partial. They offer a glimpse of living conditions that humanitarian statistics cannot fully capture. The reality of the roughly 2,000 people remaining in this front-line town is probably even more difficult than what is documented.

Information as an act of resistance

In this context of limited access, information itself becomes an act of resistance. Civilians who manage to leave occupied areas and bear witness — to journalists, to the Foreign Ministry, to humanitarian organizations — help maintain international pressure on Russia for its violations of humanitarian law. Every documented testimony, every recorded evacuation request, is additional evidence that may be used in potential war crimes prosecutions.

Ukraine's Foreign Ministry systematically collects this information. The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission documents violations. These patiently built archives constitute a body of evidence that has already led to ICC arrest warrants — notably against Vladimir Putin for the forced deportation of Ukrainian children. The energy war in occupied territories could soon be added to that record.

I am convinced that history will remember what Putin did to Kherson — not as a war episode, but as a deliberate policy of destruction and expulsion of a population. The archives are being built. The evidence accumulates. And one day, before international justice or in the history books, these testimonies from Oleshky, Hola Prystan, Nova Zburivka will speak.

Sanctions and their limited impact on the humanitarian situation

The international community has responded to Russian abuses in occupied territories with sanctions and diplomatic resolutions. The European Union adopted its 21st sanctions package against Russia in June 2026, including measures on energy, finance, cryptocurrencies, the "shadow fleet" of Russian vessels carrying oil, and a reinforced price cap on Russian oil at $44.10 per barrel.

These sanctions have documented effects on the Russian economy — Urals crude oil prices fell to $44.3 per barrel compared to $109.7 in early April — but their immediate impact on the civilian situation in Kherson is zero. The residents of Oleshky do not have electricity today that sanctions may perhaps help restore in five years by sufficiently weakening Russia's war economy. Geopolitics and humanitarian work operate at incompatible speeds.

UN humanitarian aid: insufficient to meet needs

The UN estimated in 2026 that it needed $2.3 billion to provide assistance to 4.1 million priority Ukrainians. By mid-2026, funding covered only 12 percent of projected needs — a $2 billion shortfall that translates directly into less food, fewer medicines, and less shelter for the most vulnerable. In occupied territories, even this limited funding cannot reach those who need it.

The European Parliament, in its 2026 resolution, called for strengthened humanitarian aid and increased pressure on Russia to guarantee humanitarian access to occupied areas. These calls are legitimate but remain for now without practical effect on the ground. Russia does not allow independent humanitarian access in the areas it controls, and no power is in a position to compel it to do so without risking military escalation.

Twelve percent. That is the share of Ukrainian humanitarian needs funded by the international community according to UN data. In a world where the same allied governments can mobilize 60 billion dollars for weapons, finding 2 billion for humanitarian aid should not be an insurmountable problem. And yet. War budgets and humanitarian budgets operate in separate political spheres — it is an institutional absurdity.

A precedent for future conflicts

The war in Ukraine has transformed our understanding of energy warfare. This conflict has demonstrated that energy infrastructure — power plants, gas pipelines, pumping stations, refineries — are primary military targets in a large-scale modern war. This doctrine will not disappear when the Ukrainian conflict ends. It has already been integrated into the military planning of many state actors.

For NATO and its allies, the Ukrainian lesson implies a deep revision of critical infrastructure protection. Energy resilience is now an essential component of defense doctrine — not only for Ukraine, but for all countries that could find themselves facing high-intensity conflict. Investments in micro-grids, decentralized production capacities, and strategic energy reserves have taken on a new significance since 2022.

The difference between free and occupied territories

What distinguishes the situation of Ukrainian civilians under Russian occupation from their fellow citizens in free territories is precisely their inability to benefit from the resilience built by free Ukraine. In Kyiv, Lviv, Odessa, backup systems exist: neighborhood generators, equipped civil defense shelters, generator distribution programs, modernized district heating networks. These resilience investments cannot cross occupation lines.

For the residents of Oleshky or Hola Prystan, "energy resilience" is a concept as distant as peace. They survive with candles, mobile phones with solar batteries charged during random power interruptions, food supplies built up when roads are still passable. This desperate adaptability is admirable — but it is not a strategy. It is survival, day by day.

Resilience doesn't mean the same thing for everyone. For free Ukraine, it is a policy, an investment, an institutional capacity. For civilians under occupation, it is just the capacity to hold on one more day. This fundamental difference must be at the heart of every discussion on post-war reconstruction — and on the justice Ukraine deserves.

The question of liberating occupied territories

The long-term question for civilians in occupied Kherson is that of their liberation. If Ukraine can liberate these territories militarily — as it did with Kherson city in November 2022 — civilians will be able to access reconstruction programs, humanitarian aid, and a normalization of daily life. But this prospect assumes Ukraine maintains its offensive capacity and that the international community continues to support it.

If, on the other hand, a peace agreement freezes the current front lines — a hypothesis Zelensky cannot entirely exclude in his search for peace before the winter of 2026 — the civilians in these occupied zones would be abandoned to their fate for an indefinite period. The experience of Donbas since 2014 shows what that means: a prolonged occupation, a shrinking population, a progressive normalization of disaster.

Reconstruction as an indispensable horizon

In every scenario, reconstruction of energy infrastructure will be a colossal challenge. The World Bank estimated at the end of 2025 that Ukraine's reconstruction would require more than $500 billion over several decades. Energy infrastructure accounts for a major share of that figure — thermal plants to rebuild, distribution networks to modernize, gas transport systems to repair.

In currently occupied territories, this reconstruction cannot begin until liberation. Every additional month under occupation is a month of further infrastructure degradation, a month of additional civilian suffering, a month of displaced population that may never return. The energy war in Kherson is not just a military battle — it is a race between systematic destruction and human resilience.

$500 billion to reconstruct Ukraine. That is the price of what a single decision by Putin — invading a sovereign country — has cost humanity. This figure should be recalled every time someone talks about "compromise" or "realism" in the face of Russian aggression. There is no reasonable compromise with someone who decided to destroy an entire country.

Striking the enemy's energy sources in response

Faced with the systematic destruction of its energy infrastructure by Russian strikes, Ukraine has adopted a strategy of offensive reciprocity: striking Russian energy sources to impose a symmetric cost. Ukraine's deep-strike campaign, intensified since the start of 2026, deliberately targets Russian oil refineries, fuel depots, and pumping stations — with the objective of reducing Russia's capacity to finance and fuel its war machine. The ISW documented in its June 22, 2026 assessment that 28 strikes against Russian oil infrastructure had been carried out in June alone — an unprecedented pace illustrating the intensification of this dimension of the war.

This strategy is not merely symbolic — it has measurable economic effects. The Urals, Russia's benchmark crude, trades at roughly $44 per barrel in June 2026, partly due to production disruptions caused by Ukrainian strikes on refineries. Destroying refining capacity deprives Russia of oil revenues and complicates fuel supply for its armed forces. Every Ukrainian refinery struck by Russian missiles is also a Russian refinery struck by Ukrainian drones — a reciprocity that transforms the energy war into an attrition battle whose outcome depends on the respective production and resilience capacities of both sides.

The 40-day campaign: a coordinated energy offensive

On June 25, 2026, Zelensky approved a 40-day influence operation designed to maximize pressure on Russia ahead of potential winter negotiations. Within this framework, the energy component of the Ukrainian strike campaign is particularly significant: 660 drones were launched in one week according to available reports, a portion of them directly targeting Russian oil infrastructure. This campaign aims to demonstrate that Ukraine can impose real economic costs on Russia — beyond battlefield destruction — and to create additional pressure on the Kremlin to seriously consider negotiations from a position of growing economic weakness.

For the residents of Kherson and the occupied territories living without electricity for months, this offensive reciprocity carries a particular weight: their daily suffering becomes the moral and strategic argument for Ukraine's campaign. Ukrainians strike Russian refineries not out of a desire for revenge, but to force Moscow to understand that the war has a real cost for ordinary Russians too — and perhaps, if the pressure accumulates, to create conditions for a shift in the Kremlin's political calculus.

Ukraine's offensive reciprocity is a logical response to Russia's energy war. If Moscow uses cold and darkness as weapons, then Kyiv has the right — and the capacity — to respond on the same terrain. This is not blind vengeance. It is a strategy aimed at imposing an economic cost that convinces Putin this war isn't worth continuing.

Humanitarian aid in the face of systematic destruction

The international response to the energy war in the Kherson region illustrates both the remarkable mobilization of Western democracies and its structural limits. Generators supplied by the European Union, the United States, and humanitarian organizations help maintain minimal functions in Ukrainian-controlled areas. Ukrainian repair teams, working under the constant threat of new strikes, strive to restore electricity hours after each attack. This operational resilience — repairing as fast as the Russians destroy — is admirable, but it does not solve the fundamental problem: as long as the strikes continue, populations live in permanent energy instability.

International humanitarian organizations document the devastating impact of this energy war on civilians in Kherson and adjacent areas. Hospitals running on generator power, interrupted drinking water systems, children who cannot study for lack of electricity, elderly people dying of hypothermia in winter — these are the invisible victims of the energy war, those whose names don't appear in combat tallies but whose daily lives are being methodically destroyed by Russian strikes. The international community cannot rebuild as fast as Russia destroys.

Ukraine as a resilience model for democracies

Paradoxically, how Ukraine copes with this systematic energy war has become a resilience model studied by Western democracies. The air defense systems protecting critical Ukrainian infrastructure, the rapid repair procedures developed by DTEK and Ukrainian grid operators, the decentralization of energy production through micro-plants and distributed generators — all these adaptations are documented and analyzed by resilience planners in Europe and North America. Sweden, Finland, the Baltic states — countries that know they may be in Russia's crosshairs — are drawing the operational lessons from Ukraine's experience.

This transfer of expertise is a form of solidarity less visible than weapons deliveries, but equally valuable over the long term. Ukraine in 2026, with its partially destroyed but still functioning energy networks, with its operators repairing under fire, with its civilians adapting to conditions no one would have imagined possible four years ago, is an example of what democratic resilience can accomplish in the face of aggression that bets precisely on moral and physical exhaustion. Kherson in the dark — but Kyiv standing.

Kherson in the dark, Kyiv standing. This formula captures something essential about this war: even under the worst conditions of systematic destruction, Ukraine refuses to bend. This is not naive bravery — it is a deliberate strategy of resilience aimed at surviving until the pressure on Moscow becomes unbearable. I believe it will get there.

The energy war as a symbol of what is at stake in this conflict

The situation of occupied Kherson — its power cuts, its trapped civilians, its towns emptied of their population — is a concentrated mirror of what it means to lose against Russia. This is not an abstract war over territory. It is a war against populations, against infrastructure, against people's very capacity to live. Every lightless night in Oleshky, every family that cannot warm its children, every elderly person going without medication: these are the concrete faces of this conflict.

Europe must choose. Either it supports Ukraine with enough resolve for this war to end with the restoration of Ukrainian sovereignty, or it allows a catastrophic precedent to be set in which the destruction of a democracy is rewarded with the retention of territorial gains. The power cuts in Kherson are not a Ukrainian problem — they are a symptom of an international order that unravels when not actively defended.

The urgency of action before winter

The winter of 2026 is approaching. The diplomatic window identified by Zelensky is closing. Every week that passes without progress toward peace is another week of darkness for the civilians of occupied Kherson. The urgency is not abstract — it is measurable in degrees Celsius, in missing kilowatt-hours, in water bottles to be found. The West has the means to act: continue arming Ukraine so it can negotiate from a position of strength, and maintain diplomatic pressure on Moscow for minimum humanitarian access for civilians in occupied areas. That is not much to ask of wealthy democracies confronting a tragedy this well-documented.

By Maxime Marquette, columnist

Editorial stance

I am not a journalist but a columnist and analyst. My expertise lies in observing and analysing the geopolitical, economic and strategic dynamics that shape our world. My work is to take political strategies apart, to understand global economic movements, to put the decisions of international actors in context and to offer analytical perspectives on the changes that are redefining our societies.

I do not claim the cold objectivity of traditional journalism, which stops at reporting facts. I claim analytical clarity, rigorous interpretation and a deep understanding of the complex issues that concern us all. My role is to give meaning to the facts, to place them in their historical and strategic context, and to offer a critical reading of events.

Method and sources

This text keeps the basic distinction between verified facts and interpretive analysis. The rule never changes: a factual claim is published only when a verifiable source supports it, and the sources this article actually used are listed under Sources, never here.

Primary source families used by the publication, when the story has them: official statements from governments and international institutions, public statements by political leaders, reports from intergovernmental organisations, dispatches from recognised international news agencies.

Secondary source families: specialised publications, internationally recognised news media, analyses from established research institutions, reports from industry organisations.

When an article cites statistical, economic or geopolitical data, it comes from the institutions that produce it (intergovernmental organisations, central banks, national statistics offices), and the exact institution is named under Sources.

Nature of the analysis

The analyses, interpretations and perspectives in the analytical sections of this article are a critical, contextual synthesis based on the information available, the trends observed and the expert comments cited in the sources consulted.

My role is to interpret these facts, to set them in the context of today's geopolitical and economic dynamics, and to give them a coherent meaning within the larger story of the changes shaping our time. These analyses reflect expertise built through continuous observation of international affairs and an understanding of the strategic mechanisms that drive global actors.

This article describes a documented state of affairs on its publication date, not a prediction: later developments may shift its outlook. No update is promised in advance; when an article is corrected or completed, the change is dated in the text.

Kherson is the mirror of this war — a war that destroys ordinary lives, families, homes, and dreams, for the imperial ambitions of one man in Moscow. Europe cannot remain indifferent to this. It cannot, morally — and it cannot, strategically. If Kherson falls into oblivion, all of Europe will face the threat tomorrow. That choice belongs to us.