By John Helmer, Moscow

The western military source again: “War is war, whether you want to use terms like hybrid war or proxy war. It means destroying the enemy’s capacity to make war.  Shutting off the power in the rump Ukrainian state will do just that to the Ukrainians. If they then start to flee for refuge to Poland and Germany, this will be a disaster unparalleled in recent European history. Just the attendant collapse in telecommunications will make the place a madhouse. You can well imagine the rest. Already there are queues for water in Nikolaev, and who knows where else. How does  queueing for water, if there is any, in temperatures of minus-20C to minus-40C sound?  This won’t be like the blackouts from US sanctions and attacks in Cuba or Venezuela – there they didn’t  have to worry about freezing to death, the pipes bursting, or irreparable damage being done to billions of dollars’ worth of pumping, electrical,  and other equipment due to freezing.”

“How many people realize that a sulphur hexafluoride (SF6) circuit breaker,  commonly used in electrical substations, requires an electric heating blanket to be functional in sub-zero weather? Most westerners don’t. They are common in high voltage substations which ultimately feed the grid lines with power. In the Ukrainian case, I suspect  there is a mixture of those and older style oil circuit breakers (OCB), along with oil-filled large power transformers (LPT),  which are essential to electrical distribution. And guess where most of the oil comes from to fill these devices?”

“I suspect that most of Zelensky’s officials and officials in the supporting EU governments have persuaded themselves with their own propaganda. They aren’t daring to think through these questions, any more than they care to understand that the housing of the pumps delivering their water and treating their sewage will freeze and split apart if they are not heated via electrical means. Even if the gas is on — and it won’t be — electricity is needed to ignite, then control, furnaces. How many of these officials understand the long lead times, compounded by manufacturing shutdowns due to high energy costs, which you must have to replace and restore everything?”

“Who then will ‘stand with Ukraine’ when the gas and electricity rationing and unpayable consumer bills  roll over the Ukrainian border and into Poland, Germany, France, and the UK, as they are already doing?”

http://johnhelmer.net/russian-army-fires-old-sparky-us-loses-the-electric-war-in-the-ukraine/