Moskva sunk, Crimea hit: Russia's delayed retaliation

Six months of war: Ukraine maintains power, water, and internet

The flagship of the Black Sea Fleet rests on the seabed. Fuel depots burn in Belgorod, inside Russian territory. Dugin’s daughter dies in an attack in central Moscow. Strikes against targets within Crimea continue. Four blows that, according to the thread’s opening argument, would each justify a forceful response. The response does not come.

This is the anomaly debated since the sixth month of the Ukraine war. The question is not what peine, but why the other things did not. The comparison launched in the debate: if Saddam Hussein’s agents had killed the daughter of a US tycoon on Washington streets during the first Gulf War, one can imagine what would have trinc.

Initially, restraint was justified by the idea that Ukrainians are a brotherly people and causing them more damage than necessary is undesirable. That framework, it is argued, is broken. Relations between both countries are damaged for at least the next few decades. Without that sentimental brake, there is no evident reason for the power grid to remain standing.

Why hasn't Russia attacked the Ukrainian power grid?

Substations, water pumping units, data centers, and internet nodes in the center and west of the country remain operational. A participant offers the technical explanation regarding range: attacking effectively hundreds of kilometers deep requires air superiority and dozens of aircraft operating simultaneously; Ukraine retains air defenses comparable to Russian offensive capabilities. A single aircraft, however fast, carrying a hundred kilos of imprecise bombs, changes nothing.

The contrast with recent US and NATO campaigns is inevitable: wars against countries with much less capacity, with two hundred daily flights over targets and barely any casualties. Russia cannot replicate that volume. Added to this is the depletion of precision missiles, scarce and difficult to replenish under sanctions, according to one participant. Another reading denies the premise: it is not incapacity, but calculation. Russia would be avoiding escalation.

A brute-force army and a Ukraine sustained by NATO

The most widespread interpretation is that of a brute-force army: heavy artillery, poor management. The criticism is harsh—mediocre equipment, troops, officers, and logistics—but has counterweights. It is argued that Ukraine does not fight alone: it receives growing amounts of Western material and defends its own territory with its back against the wall, which completely changes the equation.

There is a nuance used to refute the narrative of total incompetence: when the offensive on Kyiv failed, Ukraine had barely received NATO material. Subsequent attrition does not explain that start. And then there is the underlying problem pointed out: the gap between the military power attributed to it and its performance on the ground.

Normal life in central and western Ukraine: resources enter from Poland and Romania

Central and western Ukraine, sixth month of war: electricity, drinking water, internet, people in the streets, and no rationing. Supplies flow without obstacle from Poland and Romania. Those suffering the dirty part of the conflict are in the east, precisely the territory the intervention claimed to defend.

The Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, as noted, continued supplying energy to Kyiv and the rest of the capital-controlled zones. Russian gas flowed through NS1 almost until the end of the period, and pipelines crossing Ukraine were not cut in two hundred days of war. The only supply cut cited in the opposite direction is that of drinking water to Crimea, later restored. That the adversary’s network functions intact breaks the narrative for many.

The hypothesis of a staged theater and the slow victory narrative

Here enters the most uncomfortable current: the one holding that everything is agreed upon, that the conflict is administered to keep it balanced, and that the real objective is the impoverishment of Europe. It is a suspicion, not a documented thesis: there is no proof backing it and as an explanation it leaves out any miscalculation. But it is repeated, insistently.

Opposite is the reading that Russia wins slowly: making record profits, not biting the bait of escalation, and having time on its side while European economies deflate. On the other side, the inventory listed ironically: a thousand tanks and a hundred thousand casualties, the Black Sea fleet inactive, and air forces unable to impose themselves. Both things coexist in the same sixth month of war.

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And the detail that disorients: Telegram channels aligned with Moscow spoke of a possible withdrawal in Kherson and considered Izium fallen while the Zaporizhzhia plant continued feeding the adversary’s electrical system. Six months, an intact network, and two narratives that do not fit together.