As fresh peace talks loom, Putin is escalating his efforts to shatter Ukraine’s economy

As Russia struggles to advance on the ground in eastern Ukraine, it is pouring more resources into the war in the skies.

Russian missiles and drones are hitting Ukraine’s energy infrastructure harder and earlier in the year than in previous years, analysts say, and the Kremlin has broadened its targets to further damage the Ukrainian economy.

An independent United Nations investigations panel last week concluded that Russia committed war crimes and crimes against humanity by intentionally attacking civilian infrastructure, particularly with attacks on vital energy systems during the severe winter of 2025-2026.

This winter, experts say attacks are expected to be worse. With the US set to mediate in fresh peace talks next week, Russian President Vladimir Putin is only escalating his attacks on Ukraine.

The Russian air campaign is now “clearly aimed at destroying the Ukrainian economy,” said John Lough, head of international partnerships at the New Eurasian Strategies Centre, a London-based think tank. Lough also told CNN that he believes many of Kyiv’s allies in Europe haven’t grasped “just how serious this situation is that is developing in Ukraine,” nor how much financial burden it could place on European partners.

“Putin has concluded that he can’t win in Donbas by committing more men to battle and trying to push forward, because the Ukrainians have actually had a relatively successful summer,” Lough said.

“(Putin) has concluded the only way to break that is to actually break the economy, and they are doing that in a systematic way.”

Cristian Vlas, an Eastern Europe researcher at ACLED, a global conflict monitor, said, “We’ll see a terrible humanitarian situation this winter and much earlier than last year.”

“It’s not going to be a winter as usual,” he told CNN.

Civilian deaths in Ukraine are at their highest since the first months of the war, with Russian strikes killing more than 2,700 Ukrainian civilians so far in 2026, according to data compiled by ACLED.

The number of Russian strikes launched on Ukraine has increased steadily in 2026. In January 2026, there were 3,650 Russian strikes on Ukraine. For October, that figure increased to 5,532.

Ukraine’s attacks inside Russia have also increased, with 2,302 strikes carried out in October. Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense said it hit at least Russian seven enterprises involved in weapons production, three military airfields and key radar and military communications facilities last month. This summer, Ukraine also launched attacks on the warehouses of Russia’s largest online retailer, Wildberries.

Russian attacks on Ukraine’s Black Sea exports, Danube River ports, industrial warehouses, railway infrastructure and steel industry are now frequent events.

Some of that infrastructure has both civilian and military purposes, but experts said that recent attacks have brazenly targeted civilians alone.

At least 55 Ukrainians were killed Monday when Russia bombed a school building used as a shelter and aid center in Zaporizhzhia, one of the deadliest incidents of a conflict in its fifth year. Moscow consistently denies targeting civilians.

Major Ukrainian steel plants in Kryvyi Rih and Zaporizhzhia were hit in ballistic missile strikes between August and October, forcing them to shut down. The city of Kryvyi Rih has raised the alarm about “serious socio-economic consequences” and loss of income for thousands of families due to the steel plant closure.

“Those are hits to Ukraine’s tax base, not just you know ‘industry’ in a very abstract manner,” Vlas said. “It hits at the people’s salaries.”

Combined with Russian strikes on other major sectors like agriculture and grain exports, Vlas noted that it appears to be an effort by Moscow to create multiple economic firestorms across Ukraine’s economy at the same time.

“They’re targeting things like malls, storages, warehouses – so, that disrupts the flow of goods, the sale of goods, and so on,” said Kateryna Stepanenko, the Russia Team Lead at the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington think tank that closely monitors the conflict.

And while Russia once mostly attacked at night, Stepanenko said that it has been increasingly conducting daytime strikes, which are partially aimed at upending day-to-day business activities in Ukraine.

“What that does is that it activates an air alert under which many Ukrainian government buildings or businesses cannot legally operate, and so that disrupts business,” she told CNN.

Strikes on energy infrastructure also disrupt economic activity, given that power and water outages severely impact businesses.

Russian forces have also started to hit energy infrastructure in areas of Ukraine that were not previously targeted, such as the western city of Rivne, said Stepanenko, which creates new challenges for Ukraine’s threadbare air defenses.

The impacts of energy strikes are mounting. Many of Ukraine’s power stations are damaged beyond repair.

“We just have to keep in mind the cumulative effect of this war, and the very great fatigue on the Ukrainian side,” Lough said. “With the fabric of the economy strained in this way, it’s really a very dangerous moment.”

Local authorities in Kyiv said that roughly 40% of buildings didn’t have heating as of Saturday. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s foreign minister Andrii Sybiha gave yet another stark warning this weekend, as the first snowfall of the year arrived in Ukraine.

“Moscow is deliberately seeking to leave millions of Ukrainians without electricity, heating, and water as winter approaches,” Sybiha said. “Russia is trying to achieve through cold and darkness what it cannot achieve on the battlefield.”

The higher civilian casualties come as Russia has expanded its use of jet-powered Shahed drones and loitering munitions – weapons that are difficult for Ukrainian forces to shoot down. Ukraine is working to improve its interception capabilities for both, but at the moment, experts said, the Russian weapons have an edge.

Ukraine is also dealing with a persistent shortage of US-made Patriot interceptors, which are one of the few defensive weapons that can take down a Russian ballistic missile.

As a result, “the civilian fatalities and casualties have been increasing almost since April, almost constantly. But the surge in fatalities in October – early October – is just staggering,” ACLED’s Vlas told CNN.

Civilians are also paying a high price.

A new report from the International Rescue Committee (IRC) found that in southern and eastern regions of Ukraine, financial distress is pushing civilians to abandon their homes or take grave risks to keep making money. For example, in some regions, IRC found that farmers were risking their lives to work on land contaminated with mines, just so they could retain some source of income.

Among hundreds of households surveyed in the region of Mykolaiv, 91% said they were in urgent need of financial assistance. In Dnipropetrovsk, 42% cited financial assistance as an urgent need.

“The lack of financial resources is not just (about) paying the bills. It really creates the pressure to make the life-changing decisions,” said Olga Kashuba, IRC’s deputy director of field management in Ukraine.

And for many civilians in eastern Ukraine, the conflict began disrupting their lives and livelihoods in 2014, she noted, meaning they have suffered more than a decade of economic pressure.

Based in Kyiv, Kashuba herself has witnessed the growing economic anxieties and the loss of neighbors’ incomes. Her local farmers’ market closed down after it was destroyed in a Russian strike. A nearby warehouse was hit in another recent attack, damaging the inventory of multiple small booksellers, she told CNN.

“When the grocery shops are burned, when the warehouses are burned… yes, it affects the goods,” Kashuba said. “But also, this is the source of income for a number of people – for thousands of people.”

CNN’s Becky Pinnington, Kosta Gak and Victoria Butenko contributed to this report.