Blackouts, tactical nukes, and drones Military expert Dmitry Kuznets explains the limits of energy warfare, tactical nuclear weapons, and UAV lethality

Winter is coming to Russia and Ukraine, and the two sides have spent the past several weeks pounding each other’s energy infrastructure, seeking to make the falling temperatures as painful as possible. Moscow has targeted Ukraine’s power grid for years in a sustained campaign to freeze the nation and paralyze its capacity for self-defense. More recently, Kyiv has demonstrated that it, too, can damage Russia’s energy infrastructure. In Crimea, officials have put price caps on fuel and imposed gasoline rationing, responding to shortages caused by Ukrainian drone attacks on oil refineries. Military expert Dmitry Kuznets joined a recent episode of Meduza’s daily podcast to discuss power-grid warfare in Russia and Ukraine. He also fielded questions about the risk of tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine and the deadliness of drones on the battlefield. 

Can either Russia or Ukraine knock out the other’s power grid this winter?

Both Russia and Ukraine are constantly adapting to overcome various countermeasures, including electronic warfare systems and air defense systems. They’re also refining their operational strategies, organizing these strikes to inflict maximum damage — damage that can influence leaders’ decisions, shift public perception, and disrupt the economy. 

In the fight against countermeasures, both sides are doing relatively well: they’re beating air defense systems, and electronic warfare systems still can’t fully stop these strikes. But major problems remain with strategic deployment. As Sergey Vakulenko at Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center has argued, it’s important not to overestimate Ukraine’s ability to damage the Russian economy by targeting oil-refining infrastructure. In previous years, Russia has also concentrated its strikes to inflict maximum damage by disrupting production and distribution in Ukraine before and at the start of winter.

Recall that successive campaigns caused major difficulties for Ukraine’s energy sector, but they fell short of triggering a total blackout that could have collapsed the economy or crashed Ukrainian society’s resolve to keep fighting. In other words, it doesn’t seem very feasible to destroy a country’s entire power grid, even with a surge in targeted, concentrated strikes.

This year, Ukraine is better prepared for another round of attacks, having stockpiled generators and batteries — many with Western support — and deployed repair capacities based on past experience. Basically, they’ve done what they can to prepare for Russia’s next attempt to disrupt the power grid. But we shouldn’t forget that the Russian military also expanded its strike capabilities while Ukraine got ready. 

This time, Ukraine is aiming for more than just passive defense. Besides building up reserves and backup energy capacity, it seeks what you might call security through deterrence.

Currently, President Zelensky has said that if Russia tries to cut off power to Kyiv, Ukraine will cut off power to Moscow. But this could only happen if Ukraine can supplement its fleet of long-range drones with missiles capable of carrying much larger payloads. While drones can target distribution networks, strikes against generation facilities with drones carrying relatively small payloads are unlikely to be effective, as Russian attacks have demonstrated. Success here requires combined strikes using both drones and missiles, but it’s unclear whether Ukraine will be able to deploy sufficient missiles with the necessary payloads this winter.

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What are the chances that Russia resorts to nuclear weapons?

It’s likely that Russia’s leadership has never seriously considered the use of tactical nuclear weapons at any stage of the war. The rationale hinges on weighing potential gains against the steep political risks inevitably associated with such escalation. The issue gained attention — with frequent reference to U.S. intelligence assessments — in the fall of 2022, when Russia was on the brink of defeat in Ukraine. The reported deliberations within the Kremlin and Russia’s General Staff about the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons were not focused on direct military gains, but rather on exerting pressure on the West and Ukraine’s leadership.

Allegedly, various scenarios were discussed, from detonating a warhead in an unpopulated area, possibly in the Arctic, to an explosion in Ukraine’s relatively deserted steppe regions, maybe somewhere between Kherson and Mykolaiv. There’s no confirmation that Russian leaders actually considered these plans, or how serious those deliberations might have been. What’s clear is that not even U.S. intelligence claims the Russian army was preparing widespread tactical nuclear strikes to gain ground on the battlefield.

Of course, tactical questions around the use of nuclear weapons in battle were studied throughout the Cold War, including military exercises simulating advances through radioactive zones created by tactical nuclear detonations. As far as we can tell, all the actual plans for using tactical nuclear munitions assumed they’d be used on a large scale; otherwise, they wouldn’t have been effective militarily.

It’s clear that a mass use of these weapons would inevitably lead to rapid escalation and could result in a large-scale nuclear exchange. Russia’s leadership probably hasn’t considered using tactical nuclear weapons for short-term military gains. However, there’s obviously a greater risk that Russia would use these weapons if it ever faced the kind of “strategic defeat” the Biden administration used to promise. Currently, with the Kremlin nowhere near such a defeat, the danger has receded accordingly.

Has the rise of drone warfare led to more or fewer deaths on the battlefield?

We have a reasonably accurate understanding of the Russian army’s losses and the size of its contingent operating in Ukraine, and the proportion of deaths to combatants seems to have stayed about the same. Russia’s losses in sheer numbers have increased, but they grow roughly in proportion to the number of troops deployed. So, the weapons used in the war haven’t become deadlier in that sense, but they have significantly affected the conduct of the war, its tactics, and likely even its overall strategy.