Playing with fire: part II

When the end finally comes in the war that Russia launched a year ago against its neighbour Ukraine (and surely it will end, won’t it?), independent but aggressive international investigators must carefully address the matter of whether Russia committed war crimes in the form of its relentless attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure, particularly those related to electricity generation and water. In the wake of the attacks, Western journalists have lauded the determination and grit of the Ukranian people. For example, The Economist reported ‘When there is no tap water at home, they melt snow. When there is no electricity, they find heat and light in cafes with diesel generators, or sleep in the offices where they work... . The horrors Mr Putin keeps inflicting on them do not seem to have dented their morale’. However, despite the determination of the Ukranian people, the devastation has been very real. In a 2022 end-of-year report on the war, The New York Times described the situation as ‘Moscow’s debilitating attacks on [Ukranian] energy infrastructure that have caused widespread power outages as the country faces freezing winter temperatures’. In mid-2022, I wrote an editorial titled ‘Playing with fire: military attacks against a civilian nuclear power station’ and assumed at that time that perhaps the war would be over not later than the end of 2022. Not only was I wrong about the end of the war, I harboured no clue in mid-2022 that the Russian onslaught would involve wholesale efforts to destroy Ukrainian infrastructure to terrorise the local population. But that is exactly what has happened. Without identifying infrastructure attacks in particular, the Associated Press reported at the end of 2022 that ‘Ten months into Russia’s latest invasion of Ukraine, overwhelming evidence shows the Kremlin’s troops have waged total war, with disregard for international laws governing treatment of civilians and conduct on the battlefield’.