Putin’s Russia seeks to sow war fatigue, says Zelenskiy

Bloomberg

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy accused Russia of trying to create a global sense of fatigue about its invasion, including by restricing the flow of gas to drive energy prices higher.
The European Union is working on “an emergency intervention and a structural reform of the electricity market” to drive down spiking power prices, according to Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the bloc’s executive arm. The EU is planning urgent steps to force down soaring power prices, von der Leyen said. “The skyrocketing electricity prices are now exposing, for different reasons, the limitations of our current electricity market design,” she said at the Bled Strategic Summit in Slovenia.
The unprecedented spike in power prices, which have soared almost 10-fold in the past year, has fueled inflation and increased the economic burden on businesses and households recovering from the pandemic. With power-plant outages further sapping supply, the Czech Republic, which holds the EU’s rotating presidency, called an extraordinary meeting of energy ministers to discuss a bloc-wide solution to the spike in power markets.
The meeting, which will take place in Brussels on Sept. 9, will debate concrete measures to tackle the energy crisis, according to Industry and Trade Minister Jozef Sikela. Czech officials are proposing to cap prices of natural gas used for power generation, Sikela said.
The Ukrainian president offered excess capacity at the country’s gas-storage facilities for the EU to use to build supplies for the winter. Ukraine can also be a contributor to the energy transition, he said via a webcast at the ONS conference in Stavanger, Norway.
Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store told the same conference Norway aims to spend 2 billion kroner this year to ensure that Ukrainians can buy gas for the winter. The support will be distributed through the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
Meanwhile, International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi will lead an inspection of the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine this week. Zelenskiy warned at the weekend that the situation at the plant remains dangerous, even after two power units were reconnected to the grid following an outage.
Russia will ensure the security of a mission from the IAEA to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant on the territory it controls in Ukraine, while it will be up to Kyiv to handle it on the other side of the front, according to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
“We’ve been waiting for this mission for a long time and consider it necessary,” he told a conference call. But he said there is “no discussion” of creating a de-militarized zone around the plant at the moment.
The Ukrainian army launched an offensive in numerous areas in the south of Ukraine, Natalia Humenyuk, a spokeswoman for the military’s southern command, said on Suspilne TV. The city of Energodar near the Zaporizhzhia plant was shelled late Sunday, according to Ukrainska Pravda news site, which also reported that Russia hit the city of Sarny in Ukraine’s western Rivne region with missiles, striking a military target. Russia hit Ukraine’s second-largest city of Kharkiv again, regional Governor Oleh Synyehubov said on Telegram.