Russia Increasingly Targeting Ukrainian Energy Grid. The Winter Could Bring A Humanitarian Crisis.

Russia is increasingly targeting Ukraine's civilian energy infrastructure in an ongoing strategy that the United Nations has said is a war crime.

Civilian deaths in Ukraine are the highest they have been since the early stages of the war, CNN reported. Citing data it received from ACLED (armed conflict location & event data project), the outlet reported that 2,700 Ukrainian civilians have been killed in 2026.

The majority of those deaths have resulted from Russian ballistic missile and drone strikes. Recent strikes have left 600,000 Ukrainians in Dnipro without power. Also, in late October, a Russian strike on a train station in Dnipro left 15 people dead.

"Putin has concluded that he can't win in Donbas by committing more men to battle and trying to push forward, because the Ukrainians have actually had a relatively successful summer," John Lough, head of international partnerships at the New Eurasian Strategies Centre, a London-based think tank told CNN. "(Putin) has concluded the only way to break that is to actually break the economy, and they are doing that in a systematic way."

A recent United Nations report found that although Russia has been targeting Ukraine's energy infrastructure for four years, those attacks have been increasing. The UN has said the attacks are a deliberate strategy by Russia to punish the civilian population.

"The Commission concludes that within the waves of attacks carried out by Russian armed forces against Ukraine's energy infrastructure, those attacks that were directed at civilian objects indispensable to the civilian population are unlawful and amount to war crimes of intentionally directing attacks against the civilian objects," the report states.

The number of Russian strikes against Ukraine has been rising over the last year. In January 2026, Russia launched about 3,650 strikes against Ukraine. By October, that figure had risen to 5,532.

"We'll see a terrible humanitarian situation this winter and much earlier than last year," Cristian Vlas, an Eastern Europe researcher at ACLED, told the outlet.

The UN report noted the systematic nature of the attacks, its broad geographic nature of the attacks, and the timing of the strikes.

"The intensification of the attacks during cold periods, as the predictable impact of the damage on civilians manifested itself, demonstrates the intent of the Russian authorities to inflict harm to the civilian population in Ukraine," the report states.