UK intelligence: Russia aims to 'cause wide-spread damage to Ukraine's energy distribution network'

As Russian forces have been suffering from battlefield defeats since August, they have intensified "long-range strikes against targets across Ukraine," the U.K. Defense Ministry reported on Oct. 18. "It is highly likely that a key objective of this strike campaign is to cause wide-spread damage to Ukraine's energy distribution network," reads the report.

On the morning of Oct. 18, Russian troops once again hit energy infrastructure objects – this time in Kyiv, Dnipro, and Zhytomyr, causing power and water outages in some arear.