Gwendolyn Sasse, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace:
Russian air strikes against Ukrainian cities continue to target critical infrastructure and civilians in an attempt to break the resolve of the Ukrainian population.
Russia’s warfare demonstrates on a daily basis what this war is about: the destruction of the Ukrainian state and the Ukrainian nation.
The repair of infrastructure is a race against time, with winter temperatures making each power outage and disruption to the heating system or water supplies potentially deadly. Large-scale human suffering and further displacement are part of the Russian calculation.