I have to be careful when linking to John Helmer at Dances with Wolves.
He's been reporting from Russia for a very long time, which raises the red flag question, why are the Rooskis putting up with him.
And the answer, of course, is that he serves some purpose for the regime and since he's in media it's probably because he's somewhere on the spectrum between CNN's Eason Jordan:
CNN chief news executive Eason Jordan yesterday sent a memo to his staff defending his decision to withhold information about how Saddam Hussein's regime had intimidated, tortured and killed Iraqis who had helped the cable news network over the years....—WaPo, April 15, 2003
His approach became known as "Taking the Eason Way Out...". Catchy, someone should write a song.
Somewhere between that and the New York Times' Pulitzer prize winner, Walter Duranty who was an actual mouthpiece for Stalin.
First up, the Kagan clan's Institute for the Study of War:
Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, June 8, 2024
....Russian strikes have caused widespread damage to Ukraine's energy grid, and Ukraine will continue to face serious constraints on power generation capacity. Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal stated on June 7 that only 27 percent of large Ukrainian thermal power plants (TPPs) are operational and that Russian missile and drone strikes damaged or destroyed the other 73 percent.[23] Shmyhal stated that recent Russian strikes have knocked out 9.2 gigawatts of Ukrainian generation capacity and stated that this is half of the generation capacity that Ukraine used in Winter 2023-2024.[24] The Financial Times (FT) reported on June 5 that Russia has knocked out or captured over half of Ukraine's generation capacity, bringing Ukrainian energy production to below 20 gigawatts from 55 gigawatts before the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022.[25] Shmyhal stated that Russian forces have destroyed 42 power generators and damaged 20 hydropower generators at Ukrainian energy generation facilities.[26] Shmyhal emphasized that Ukraine is taking steps to relieve pressure on Ukraine's energy grid and plans to restore as much energy generation capacity as possible before Winter 2024-2025.[27] Ukraine’s nuclear operator Energoatom stated on June 7 that it connected an additional reactor at an unspecified nuclear power plant to the energy grid.[28] The head of Ukrainian state electricity transmission operator Ukrenergo, Volodymyr Kudrytskyi, stated that this will relieve Ukrainian power constraints for the next two weeks before increased summer consumption begins.[29] Shmyhal stated that Ukraine is currently importing 1.7 gigawatts from the European Union (EU) but that the EU is able to export a maximum of 2.2 gigawatts to Ukraine.[30]....
And from Dances With Bears, April 2:
"ELECTRIC WAR GOES WEST – DEPOPULATION TURNS INTO DISPLACEMENT TURNS INTO CIVIL WAR IN GALICIA"
Go West, young man – that American slogan of the mid-19th century is not an idea the Ukrainian men of Odessa, Kharkov, Dniepropetrovsk, Poltava and Sumy can contemplate today as long as the danger of press ganging into the army in Kiev and Lvov is a higher risk to their lives than staying put in the eastern cities as they collapse.
They must calculate that they are better off trying to do without electricity in the east, and wait for the Kremlin to suspend the campaign – as it did during 2023 – or for the Russian General Staff to pressure the Novorussian cities to surrender to Russian control, when the Ukrainian men will be filtered but keep their lives.
The women and children, however, are evacuating from Sumy and Kharkov.* The displacement of these easterners to the west, from Kiev to Lvov, is not yet being reported by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) which publishes its Ukrainian population movement data in the third week of each month.
At the end of December, the total number of internal refugees or internally displaced persons (IDP) in the bureaucratic records, was 3.7 million. This number is increasing sharply now, but the UNCHR reports are lagging by four weeks, and there are no reliable real-time figures available.
The Polish Border Guard, however, is reporting every two days the movement of Ukrainians into Poland and their reverse movement from Poland into the Ukraine. A surge out of the Ukraine, like that of the first months of the Special Military Operation in 2022, is not yet visible in the Polish data.
In the Border Guard twitter reports for the month of March, there were big surges on March 1-3, March 8-10, March 18-19, March 22-24, and March 29-April 1. The timing reflects the weekends, and the flows out of the Ukraine into Poland were equally balanced by the numbers returning. That is, until March 22-24 when the electric war began in earnest, and 82,000 Ukrainians crossed into Poland, while only 72,900 returned. Over the Catholic Easter weekend of March 29-April 1, 108,000 moved into Poland; only 82,100 came back.
The difference of 26,000 were not Easter pilgrims or holidaymakers. This the largest recorded at the Polish-Ukrainian border since 2022 – it is the beginning of a new Ukrainian surge out of the country into Europe.
Sources in Warsaw say there is “attention fatigue” towards the refugees on the part of the Poles. “There is nothing new in the local media on the flows of Ukrainians. No longer topic of interest. The new Polish government plans allegedly to tighten financial rules for Ukrainian refugees in order to cut welfare costs and combat “the pathologies that currently exist.”
The Polish press reported late last week that “the most important change concerns the financing of refugees’ stay. The government intends to abolish the system that currently subsidizes the stay of refugees from Ukraine (PLN 40 [$10] per day per person) in small guesthouses where up to ten people live. Revolutionary changes for newcomers from Ukraine, especially those who benefit from free food and accommodation, are to be included in the draft amendment to the special act, which came into force two years ago.”
Moscow sources believe the operational plan of the General Staff, agreed by the Kremlin since last month’s election, is to depopulate Kharkov and the surrounding region north to Sumy, and press equally hard in the centre (Dniepropetrovsk) and the south (Odessa). For maps of the campaign so far, click.
According to a Moscow source, debate over operational priorities in the political and military strategy is muted. “This time round,” the source believes, “the General Staff aims not to suspend the attacks, not to relieve the pace, so that the Ukrainian utilities cannot repair or restore power supplies — no repeat of the first phase of the electric war which stopped at the end of 2022.”
For the first phase of the electric war in 2022, read this.
A western military source thinks the impact in the west, especially in the western region of Galicia around Lvov which is the historic centre of Ukrainian fascism, will be chaotic and violent between the established, well-off westerners and the incoming poorer easterners. “Another mass in-migration to Kiev and west won’t go over well when rent extortion meets high power tariffs, fuel shortages, outrageous grocery prices, then even wilder power tariffs in the midst of outages. This is when ‘the master race’ will forget all their ‘European civilization’ slogans, and start killing each other over a litre of gasoline. Is Russian intelligence factoring this into their strategy? Sure.”
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNCR) publishes regular data updates on the movement of Ukrainians within the country, moving westward from the line of contact, and the exodus of Ukrainians across the Polish, Slovakian, Moldovan, and Romanian borders....
....MUCH MORE
