KYIV, UKRAINE — Russia launched a massive missile and drone barrage against Ukrainian energy infrastructure early Monday, marking the fourth consecutive winter in which the Kremlin has demonstrated its commitment to seasonal consistency by trying to freeze a country of 38 million people three days before Christmas.
The strikes, which targeted substations, thermal plants, and the natural gas network across at least seven oblasts, arrived with the punctuality of a Hallmark Channel premiere. Air raid sirens sounded in Kyiv at 4:17 a.m., a window the Russian Aerospace Forces have now hit so reliably that Ukrainian utility workers describe it as “the shift.”
The Kremlin, for its part, characterized the operation as a strike on “military-related energy objects,” a category that under current Russian doctrine appears to include kindergartens, an apartment building in Kharkiv, and the lights.
“At this point it isn’t really a campaign, it’s a recurring calendar event,” said Lior Vansten, a Eurasia analyst at the Atlantic Heartland Project. “They’ve done this in 2022, 2023, 2024, and now 2025. The only escalation left is a save-the-date.”
The barrage involved roughly 250 drones and several dozen cruise and ballistic missiles, according to Ukraine’s Air Force, which said it shot down most of them and politely requested that someone in Washington consider sending the other Patriot battery currently sitting in a warehouse in Poland for reasons no one will explain on the record.
European leaders responded with the full diplomatic toolkit available to them in late December, which is to say a series of tweets, a joint statement drafted at the staff level, and one foreign minister who interrupted a ski vacation long enough to say the strikes were “unconscionable” before returning to the lift.
The White House condemned the attack in a written statement that did not mention Russia by name until the seventh paragraph, where it appeared in a clause about “all parties.” A senior administration official, asked whether additional air defense would be expedited, said the matter was “under active review,” a phrase that in this administration has the same operational meaning as “lost.”
In Kyiv, residents began the day the way they have begun roughly forty such mornings: by checking which neighborhood still had electricity, charging power banks at the cafés that did, and explaining to children that Saint Nicholas can in fact deliver presents in the dark, because he has been doing it here since 2022.
One power engineer in Dnipro, reached by phone during a four-hour repair window, said his crew had rebuilt the same transformer station three times this year and was preparing to do it a fourth. Asked how morale was holding up, he laughed for several seconds and then hung up to go back to work.
Vladimir Putin is expected to address the nation on Thursday in a holiday message emphasizing peace, family, and the unbreakable spirit of the Russian people, delivered from a palace that, sources confirm, will have its heat on.