“A combination works the best,” he added, “because purely economic sanctions — it’s also an option, but it’s a very expensive option and sometimes it’s not the fastest.”
Ukrainian officials begged Americans for air-defense systems throughout 2021. The Biden team largely held back on that front, with national security adviser Jake Sullivan telling media in December that the administration would provide “additional defensive materiel” to the embattled democracy if Russia deepened its invasion.
Vitrenko said the U.S. ban on Russian oil and gas imports signals to Putin that the West is determined to combat his aggression, at least economically. And he said more expensive oil is “the price that the world has to pay now to stop the war.”
He also said that Russia is targeting civilian energy infrastructure in Ukraine — and while the country has enough stored gas and local production capacity to meet its energy needs, its transport capabilities have sustained serious damage.
Earlier on Tuesday, he said Russians bombed the last centralized heating plant in Sievierodonetsk, a city of more than 100,000 people. He said Russians have also shelled a major, high-pressure pipeline moving gas from Donetsk to Mariupol.
Naftogaz handles exploration, production, and distribution of oil and natural gas in Ukraine, and its website says it’s the biggest state-owned company in the country. Much of the gas European countries buy from Russia moves through energy systems in Ukraine, and — as The Wall Street Journal has detailed — those shipments have continued even during the invasion. A major challenge facing Ukrainians on the energy front is the immense difficulty of moving gas since Russian troops have caused significant damage to the country’s pipelines.
“Our employees, they go and repair the pipes and boilers and other infrastructure literally under the bullets, still when it’s possible,” he said. “Because when it’s heavy bombing, then of course there’s nothing they can do.”
He said the Russians are deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure to pressure the Ukrainian government to make concessions.
“It’s a war crime,” he said.
Vitrenko also slammed Russian troops’ targeting of Ukraine’s nuclear power plants, risking damage to reactors and nuclear waste storage facilities. Some Russian soldiers, he added, have struggled to understand warnings from Ukrainian personnel about the damage they could do.
“Some of them could barely speak … even Russian language, they were so uneducated. … Some of them were saying, we are not firing at the reactors,” he said. “And it was difficult to explain to them, first of all, it’s dangerous when you fire in this direction because anything could happen.”
Vitrenko said Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has discussed the concerns with French President Emanuel Macron and with Biden, despite the fact that Russian strikes near power plants seem to have fallen off. But that hasn’t eased his worries. His anxiety about nuclear power plants’ security has reached “the highest possible level of concern,” Vitrenko said.