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Russia accuses Ukraine of firing on energy sites
Apr 2, 2025
Russia's Defence Ministry on Tuesday accused Ukraine of attacking Russian energy infrastructure twice in the past 24 hours despite a US-brokered moratorium on striking each other's energy facilities. Ukrainian drones hit electricity substations in part of Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia in southeast Ukraine and in Russia's southern Belgorod region, leaving residents without power, the ministry said. FRANCE 24 Senior Reporter Catherine Norris Trent explains.
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Now, authorities in Ukraine and Russia are accusing each other of striking energy infrastructure
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It comes a week after maritime, an energy ceasefire was agreed to between the two sides
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Moscow has rejected a joint U.S.-Ukrainian proposal for an unconditional 30-day truce
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Over the weekend, the U.S. President Donald Trump said he was pissed off at Vladimir Putin
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and he also had sharp words for Ukraine's president for backtracking on a rare-earth minerals deal
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which Kiev and Washington were due to sign. Here's Ukraine's foreign minister speaking about those strikes earlier today
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After negotiations in Riyadh, one of the agreements with the United States
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was not to strike energy infrastructure. However, Russia continues to violate this agreement
0:51
Energy facilities in Kherson, Kharkiv and Poltava have already been damaged. And this morning, another Russian strike damaged a power facility in Kherson, leaving 45,000 residents without electricity
1:06
We can now bring in France 24 senior reporter, Catherine Norris-Trent, who has just come back from Ukraine
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Catherine, great to see you as always. So you were in the country for a couple of weeks
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What do people you met with think about the current effort underway, the American effort underway to bring this war to an end
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It was striking that people in Ukraine are very, very sceptical about this actually bringing them any kind of meaningful peace or kind of benefits
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So they're very sceptical of Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, and anything he says
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I mean, everyone I spoke to basically said that. They said he's broke ceasefires before. Why should we trust him this time
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They think he's dragging out his feet. They're also sceptical about the process involving Donald Trump
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I mean, if you listen to some of what his envoy, Steve Witkoff, said, I mean, people kind of really can't believe what they're hearing
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This for them are things that shouldn't be discussed in this way and discussed without them
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So there's, I would say, a very disconsolate mood in Ukraine right now
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I had met people back in September when I was last on assignment there who thought that, you know, maybe Donald Trump would
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If you throw the cards up into the air, the pack might land in a different way and things might move in some way, which was beneficial to them
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I think that kind of illusion has gone now and people are feeling that things are not playing out in their favor and they worried things could get much much worse quite soon Because we had this baby stuff we don have a 30 day full on truce but we supposedly have a partial truce on maritime and energy infrastructure Is that in place
2:41
Because both sides seem to be accusing each other of violating it, right, especially on the energy
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infrastructure attacks, we hear just completely contradictory statements from the Ukrainians and from the Russians, both coming out and say, look, the other side has violated this at the
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moment, there's no impartial presence actually policing even this limited ceasefire. So you're
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getting these claims. I mean, there's OSINT work that's being done. There are pictures coming out
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So at the moment, yeah, you've got these tit for tat reports. So it seems that even that is
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difficult to put in place, which, you know, brings the question of if there was a full ceasefire or
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a truce, who would police that? Who would be on the ground? Because people who are seen as fair
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brokers by Ukraine are not by Russia. Russia has repeatedly said they doesn't want to see any
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European troops or NATO troops on the ground, even as some kind of peacekeeping or reassurance force
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So, you know, there are so many details to any kind of ceasefire to be worked out before we even
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get there. And I think the fact that we're seeing this blame gain on the energy infrastructure just
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highlights that. How can anything be put in place with two parties who don't trust each other
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fundamentally different names and do not trust each other one bit. And every night, you know
3:56
we see these massive drone attacks that come from Russia into Ukraine. And you yourself have been
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witnessing this while you were on the ground. Yeah, that's correct. So this war has long been
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a drone war. We've seen that, but it's dramatically increased. I think that's really what you get
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when you're on the ground. You see just the quantity of drones. So flying over Ukrainian
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cities every night and making pretty much every night and hitting civilian infrastructure among
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other infrastructure i mean that's kept very secret in ukraine you don't get information about
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when it's not civilian infrastructure but we do know that it does hit civilian infrastructure
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pretty much every night because the ukrainian air defense can't really shoot it all down
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and then you have near the front lines a huge saturation in the skies of various drone technology
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and a huge number of different drones have been produced by the way there are all kinds of drone
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jamming equipment. This is footage we filmed in Kharkiv in the northeast of Ukraine, just
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after a drone strike which hadn't been intercepted in the northeast of the country. And a Shahed
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drone had hit a warehouse of a fruit and vegetable market at the end of a civilian street. And
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these drones are relatively cheap to produce for Russia maybe Sounds like a lot of money but in the big scheme of things in the war it not So they are flying a large number of these over the cities
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and they get through the air defences because air defence missiles can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars
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A Patriot missile, it's like a million dollars. They don't use those to shoot at drones
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But you see the cost disparity between the cheap drones and how expensive it is to shoot them down
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So they do get through. And that's what it looks like when one hits. So it's a cheap piece of equipment, but you do get that
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And I want to bring you an extract of a report we did, actually, from near the front lines where there are just constant drones flying overhead
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And it's terrifying because you hear the engine, you hear it coming
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you hear the machine gun fire of the Ukrainian forces desperately trying to shoot it down
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And the people there hide because they know that anyone who's spotted is basically a target
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And so you get out of view of it as you can. We were wearing our flak jackets under our clothes
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because if you're spotted in a flak jacket, you are a target. So you can take a look at this report and you can kind of just see the fear and the panic
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when you hear that drone flying overhead. Suddenly, there's a sound of another drone engine in the sky
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They were trying to shoot it down with rifles
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With regular small arms, you can only shoot a drone down with concentrated fire
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And since it's flying at high speed, it's very hard to hit. There are rockets that could shoot down these drones, but it's a question of cost of the
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drones compared to the rocket. So that's just one example, Delano, but that happens several times every single day
7:01
The troops are very nervous about it, not just the people there who are living under this threat of drone strikes
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but the troops are very nervous. Even getting to and from the frontline positions has become extremely dangerous for them
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and it's something they are visibly nervous about. When you're with them and you see them driving, they drive at high speeds, they get undercover as quickly as they can
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And that's happening in Bordelov as well. Yeah, that is happening all over the country
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This was actually a village in the Dnipropetrovsk region of Ukraine, which until now had not been under threat of the Russian troops
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I mean they bombed it there was strikes on it but the front line is getting so closer that the Russians are close to getting perhaps some territory soon in that region For the first time ever including in 2014 you can see that it outside of the Donbass there This front line has despite the efforts of the Ukrainian army
7:51
been creeping ever forward. And you have an extract to show us from Sumy
7:57
Yes, so we went up to the north of the country, the Sumy region, and it's from there, if you remember
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that the Ukrainian forces pushed forward into Kusk, into that northern region, Russia actually
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a southern bit of Russia, and they've got that enclave. They've almost completely been pushed out
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There's still a bit of territory, we understand, from sources we spoke to
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But you've got a new wave of refugees, and you can see them there. Often, again, these old people coming, and they're fleeing villages
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because not only are the Russians pushing the Ukrainians out, they're actually pushing into Ukrainian territory in that area
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So they're firing again with drones, shelling it pretty heavily. And so these people are, again, leaving their homes
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and they're worried that Russia is trying to create some kind of buffer zone there in the north of Ukraine and trying to press forward
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Very fierce fighting going on, by all means. And you can listen to what some of those people there in the Sumi region told us
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I know Russian scouts are hidden away, but advancing. They're trying to penetrate our soldiers' lines
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We came under fire from their fighters and artillery. I was in my house, everything was shaking
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I hid my head under a blanket and just waited. It's very hard for the elderly to leave their homes
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their villages, their families. Very hard. If there is a ceasefire, it will give our leaders time to reach an agreement
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and above all, it will stop the bombing. So those people, they're very much fearing that this offensive there will continue
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And in fact, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and several Ukrainian officials are fearing that now Russia is actually preparing a spring-summer offensive
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not only on that front, but also in the east, in the Donbass and in the south
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because they'd used a lot of troops in that Kursk offensive, and the Russian troops have deployed a great number of troops there
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and now that they've got the upper hand, they could redeploy to other front lines
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and try and push forward to gain as much ground as they can before any kind of ceasefire could come into place
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A real ceasefire indeed. Captain, thank you very much for that. Captain, I was trying to do that
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