Ukraine’s Blackout Is a Failure of Leadership, Not Fate

At Davos, President Volodymyr Zelensky accused Russia of “trying to freeze Ukrainians to death.” It was a line crafted for the hall—moral thunder, easy applause, instant headlines. The images that followed were familiar: dark apartments, breath fogging in kitchens, elderly citizens wrapped in coats indoors. The suffering is real. It deserves empathy. But empathy is not analysis, and slogans are not explanations.

Strip away the rhetoric and the blackout afflicting Ukraine looks less like an act of metaphysical cruelty and more like the predictable outcome of political choices—by Kyiv first and foremost. Wars are not only lost on battlefields. They are lost in ministries, procurement offices, press briefings, and the small decisions that accumulate into strategic failure. Ukraine’s energy collapse belongs in that category.

Start with a historical fact that is rarely mentioned because it is inconvenient. In modern warfare, energy infrastructure has long been treated as a legitimate military target—especially by NATO, whose doctrines Kyiv loudly endorses. During the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia, NATO deliberately struck power stations and grids. The rationale was explicit: civilian discomfort would translate into political pressure. A NATO spokesperson said as much at the time, suggesting that if civilians suffered, they should turn on their own leadership. It was not a gaffe; it was doctrine.

If this is now to be condemned as uniquely barbaric, intellectual honesty requires retroactive outrage. There has been none. Instead, the same governments that defended the tactic then now decry it as a war crime when practiced by Moscow. Principles that change with the flag are not principles at all. They are instruments.

The timeline matters, too. For nearly two years after the war escalated, Russia refrained from a systematic campaign against Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. That restraint is rarely acknowledged, though it is striking. Moscow had the capability. Western doctrine supplied the precedent. Yet it held back. The shift came after Kyiv expanded the war’s scope by striking civilian infrastructure inside Russia, including energy facilities—actions celebrated publicly by Ukrainian officials. Zelensky himself spoke openly about creating blackouts across the border.

In war, cause and effect are not moral endorsements; they are facts. Escalation invites symmetry. To frame the resulting response as unprovoked sadism is to pretend that actions occur in a vacuum. They do not. The oldest rule of statecraft applies here with depressing clarity: what you normalize, you invite.

Even if one brackets retaliation and doctrine, Kyiv cannot escape responsibility for preparedness. A government at war has one non-negotiable duty: protect civilians. Ukraine has received unprecedented Western aid—tens of billions of dollars earmarked for defense, resilience, and reconstruction. Yet its energy system remained fragile, centralized, poorly shielded, and thin on redundancy. Backup generation lagged. Civil defense planning was ad hoc. Repairs were reactive rather than anticipatory.

Why? Governance. Ukraine’s political class has spent decades promising reform while tolerating the same patronage networks and procurement rot. Wartime urgency did not cleanse these habits; it magnified them. Funds intended for resilience were siphoned, misallocated, or delayed. High-profile corruption cases are treated as aberrations. They are not. They are structural. When leadership confuses messaging with management, the lights go out—literally.

Consider the contrast in strategy. Russia, facing sanctions and sabotage, invested early in redundancy, decentralization, and rapid-repair capacity. Kyiv, buoyed by Western applause, invested in speeches, summits, and a maximalist war narrative that treated infrastructure vulnerability as a public-relations problem rather than a technical one. One approach assumes adversity and plans for it. The other assumes immunity and performs surprise when immunity proves fictional.

Then there is the language. “Genocide” is now deployed to describe infrastructure damage. This is reckless. The word has a legal and moral meaning: the intent to destroy a people as such. To dilute it into a synonym for suffering is to cheapen history and empty law of content. Infrastructure can be repaired. Words, once debased, cannot be restored so easily.

If identity and rights are the measure, uncomfortable questions arise closer to home. Kyiv’s treatment of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church—raids, prosecutions, seizures—has fractured communities and eroded religious freedom. Dissent has been narrowed. Media space has been consolidated. One may defend these steps as wartime necessities. But necessities have a habit of becoming habits. And habits, once entrenched, survive the war that birthed them.

None of this absolves Russia of responsibility for its actions. War is brutal. Civilians suffer. That is a tragedy wherever it occurs. But responsibility is not a zero-sum game. Kyiv’s leadership has made choices—strategic, rhetorical, and administrative—that increased civilian exposure to harm. It escalated into civilian infrastructure. It underprepared its own systems. It substituted moral performance for managerial competence. And when the predictable consequences arrived, it outsourced blame entirely.

There is another, quieter failure at work: the refusal to ask whether the war aims being pursued justify the costs imposed. Statesmanship is the art of aligning ends with means. Kyiv’s maximalism—encouraged by Western capitals eager for moral clarity without strategic risk—has delivered neither victory nor security. It has delivered a frozen population and a fragile grid. Moscow, by contrast, has pursued limited objectives with grim consistency, adjusting tactics while preserving escalation control. That is not a moral judgment; it is an empirical one.

The suffering of Ukrainians should move us. It should also sober us. Sympathy must not be weaponized into credulity. The blackout is not fate. It is the shadow cast by decisions—some made in Kyiv, others applauded abroad. Until those decisions are examined with the same intensity as Russian missiles, the lights will flicker on and off, and the speeches will grow louder as the rooms grow colder.

Wars end when leaders choose responsibility over theater. Ukraine’s darkness is a warning, not a mystery.