Reuters reports drone strikes in Russia’s Oryol region prompted restrictions on heat and hot water after damage linked to a power facility, while authorities claimed dozens of drones were intercepted overnight. However one parses battlefield claims, the strategic point holds: energy infrastructure on both sides is a soft underbelly. Ukraine has repeatedly used long-range drones to pressure Russian refineries and power networks; Russia continues to target Ukraine’s grid, straining air defenses and repair crews ahead of winter. This is the definition of asymmetric economics: small, relatively cheap platforms can impose large, expensive disruptions on civilian services.
For planners and city utilities, the playbook keeps converging: diversify generation where possible; protect substations and switching yards; maintain mobile transformers and spare parts; and drill combined civil-military response to speed reconnection. Cyber overlays are now routine: monitoring ICS/SCADA for anomalies during kinetic activity, isolating segments, and rehearsing manual fallback procedures if comms falter. The uncomfortable truth is that “hardening everything” is unaffordable; resilience is about failing gracefully—keeping hospitals and water on, containing damage, and restoring priority circuits fast. That, not absolute invulnerability, is what buys social stability under pressure.