Thread by @cirnosad

Why did Russia wait until now to start completely destroying Ukraine's infrastructure.
1. It accelerates the escalation and shortens the time of the warm phase of the war.
2. It makes reconstruction close to impossible, some in the Kremlin thought they could repeat Crimea.
🧵

3. These strikes are extremely cruel, but necessary, since it's a part of knocking out C4 and ISR, leaving Ukraine without any power & lighting [1]. The Russian people may not have accepted such cruelty until now. Ukrainians barbarity accelerated this.
[1]

https://twitter.com/cirnosad/status/1595748817827409924

4. Along with point 1 & 2, Russia wanted to leave itself with targets to negotiate with. At some point, the only power plants Ukraine will have left are the 3 remaining nuclear power plants.

Russia failed to capture SUNPP at the start of the war & canceled many plans, But now...

These plans will have to be revisited. One possible plan to capture SUNPP with haste is to dedicate a landing campaign in Odessa. Russia will have to commit a huge amount of destruction and civilian casualties to capture the city promptly without NATO causing issues.
Circle=NPP

[Aside: I understand some Russians claim that the city will be captured like Kherson, using infiltrators -- zero chance of that happening in my eyes. It's crawling with western intelligence, it's as secure as any western city. It's going to take force and a lot of it.]

That leaves two more power plants which must be captured intact or disabled safely. Let's look at the prospect of capturing both of them. Several cities would have to be suppressed (destroyed), and Rivne and Lutsk taken to secure a perimeter around it.
Russia faces NATO airpower.

The proximity to the Polish border would make SDBs launched by stealth multirole jets like the F35s an issue. These bombardments can then be disguised as being launched by HiMeme (the purpose of the GLSDB announcement).
The Odessa operation has similar risks but not as bad.

With this aggressive operation, two things would be knocked out:
1. Ukraine's proliferation risk.
2. Ukraine's remaining power generation.

This is a high risk operation and thus, with the current situation, I attach a low probability of the Kremlin doing something like it.

Nevertheless, unless Russia can do something of equal weight, once it has destroyed all the machine rooms of the conventional power plants, it will have no means of escalating.
That leaves Russia vulnerable to proxy attacks by NATO via Ukraine on its own infrastructure!

Furthermore, leaving these NPPs around leaves Russia vulnerable to an extremely damaging false flag. Zelensky is a madman and doesn't care about Ukraine at all,he is willing to do anything, including destroying his own NPP in order to pollute Russia's land and get NATO in the war

Thus watching this happen makes me sense the situation is changing and Russia may indeed be planning something along these lines.

Let's observe the situation closely and watch how the Russians proceed, if they do, how they plan to suppress NATO's airpower. /End