Russia plans to use the winter to cut off Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa and Lviv from the rest of Ukraine and sever its nuclear power plants from the grid, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy told the Financial Times.

The goal is to isolate the cities, break morale, sow chaos and push a new wave of refugees into the EU, according to Zelenskiy and a Ukrainian intelligence assessment described to the paper by Ukrainian and European officials. Kyiv, Kharkiv and Odesa are the main targets, with Lviv, the logistics hub near the Polish border, also in the plan. Strikes on nuclear facilities are meant to raise the pressure on Kyiv to accept Moscow's terms in early 2027.

The refugee element is aimed at the EU's politics as much as Ukraine's infrastructure, landing on countries where anti-immigrant sentiment is rising. Tensions with Poland have grown this year and attacks on Ukrainians there have increased, the FT reported.

Kyiv already has some of the paperwork. First Deputy Prime Minister and Energy Minister Denys Shmyhal said on September 25 that Ukraine had obtained two Russian planning documents listing power plants, heating, water and sewage systems and the interconnectors with Europe as targets, with tables of the missiles and drones needed to destroy each one. "There are two large documents, written very coldly and very clearly," he said.

The New York Times, which obtained a copy of the intercepted plan, reported on October 2 that it describes a campaign of up to 1,000 missiles, drones and bombs against substations, hydroelectric and thermal power plants and boiler houses. Russia intends to force Ukraine's three operating nuclear power plants to shut down by firing missiles at the electrical switchyards that connect them to the grid, less than 1.6 km from the reactors, the paper reported. Shmyhal showed the document to European partners in Paris two weeks ago.

The threat is not confined to Ukraine. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said Europe was preparing for "severe" Russian hybrid attacks after Vladimir Putin warned that his conflict with the West could reach a "fatal point of no return", the Financial Times reported on October 1. "We are preparing for further hybrid attacks, including severe ones," Merz said. "Should they occur, we would respond quickly and very clearly."

The war has been escalating since July, when Ukraine took its drone campaign from Russian refineries to Russian retail and burned the Wildberries logistics centre outside Moscow. The warehouse war that followed took both sides into each other's civilian economies, and Putin promised retaliation against Ukraine's "most sensitive economic sectors", saying Kyiv had opened a Pandora's box. What had been a war of attrition has become a total war.

Russia's plan raises the question of how much of Ukraine is left to destroy. Direct physical damage reached $197.5bn by February, according to the KSE Institute, and its estimate of lost output, from foregone GDP to lost exports and the people who left, runs to $1.7 trillion, roughly three times Ukraine's pre-war GDP. That is one of the heaviest economic tolls of any war in modern times, and the count stops before this summer's bombardment.

Here is what has already been hit, and what more damage would mean.

The damage so far

Men: Ukraine is running short of soldiers. Kyrylo Budanov, head of the Presidential Office, said in August that the army needs to draft 30,000 men a month just to stay the same size, and street conscription is producing fewer recruits and more anger. Prosecutors had opened 311,327 criminal cases for desertion or going absent without leave between January 2022 and October 2025. The gaps in the line have let Russian assault troops infiltrate in groups of one or two men to get behind Ukrainian positions, and the Armed Forces of Ukraine are relying on drones to fill the holes. Russia is losing large numbers of men, but its well-paid volunteer recruitment has so far roughly kept pace.

Money: Kyiv said in August that it needed an extra $27bn this year, mostly for defence, and Zelenskiy warned that without the money Ukraine would run short of drones in January. The European Commission said on October 1 that it had identified the means to cover all of Ukraine's 2026 budget and defence needs, Euronews reported. Finance Minister Serhii Marchenko had warned in September that public-sector salaries could be delayed, calling that a potential "financial catastrophe". Next year is worse: Marchenko puts the 2027 gap at $78bn, $32.6bn on the budget and $45bn on the military, while the IMF's preliminary estimate of the hole is $30bn-35bn.

Power: Ukraine went into the war with about 54.5 GW of generating capacity and has about 12 GW left, according to government figures, leaving a deficit of 5-6 GW at peak. Russia destroyed 9 GW last winter alone. It has already restarted, launching its largest energy attack since the spring on the night of September 29-30 and damaging the Trypillia power plant and Kyiv's CHP-5. Russia has also started using drones fitted with shaped charges to bring down pylons, as it moves from power stations to the substations and lines that move power, the strategy of freezing Ukraine into submission it has tried every winter.

Metal: Steel was Ukraine's biggest export before the war. In September the country went a whole week without producing any, the first such shutdown in a century, Metinvest executive Oleksandr Vodoviz said, after Russian strikes damaged every steel plant in the country. Restarting a single blast furnace at Zaporizhstal would cost at least $50mn, and the furnace itself is worth about $500mn. Losing the mills cuts off a large source of export revenue and threatens the towns built around them, where each plant employs thousands of people.

Mining and gas: A Russian strike hit the administrative building of DTEK's Pavlohradvuhillia coal company in Dnipropetrovsk region on October 1, injuring two employees, the company said. DTEK says its thermal power plants have been shelled more than 230 times since the full-scale invasion began. Naftogaz has been hit repeatedly as Russia goes after domestic energy production, and the state company has arranged to store fuel in Hungary, out of range of Russian missiles.

Grain and ports: More than 90% of Ukraine's farm exports used to leave through its Black Sea ports until Russian strikes all but shut Odesa this summer, crippling ports on both sides of the sea. Alternative routes carried about 44% of what current production could support in the first 20 days of September, and could reach about 50% at best, the agriculture ministry says. In a worst case Ukraine could lose up to $10bn of revenue a year. Oxford Economics puts the cost of the port strikes at 1.8% of GDP this year and up to 5.3% in 2027 if the disruption lasts.

Retail: Since Putin's Pandora's box warning, Russia has been working to destroy Ukraine's retail sector, after hitting more than 200 petrol stations in June and July. Ukraine has lost nearly half of its high-class warehouse space, retailers' logistics bills have doubled, and strikes on logistics are reckoned to be adding 0.6 percentage points to inflation. Supermarket shelves are thinning.

Telecoms and data: Russia has turned on the country's digital backbone. Drones hit data centres and internet providers in Kyiv on September 23 and 24, cutting service to about 100,000 households, and Russia's defence ministry said it struck the De Novo data centre on September 30. Business centres are now being hit too, so that companies in general struggle to work. Prime Minister Serhiy Koretskyi says the government is planning for strikes that could knock out the internet and mobile networks.

Growth: The economy is slowing as the damage mounts. The National Bank of Ukraine raised its 2026 growth forecast to 1.8% in August, but the government has since halved its own forecast to 0.5%, and its 2027 budget assumes growth of only 1.3%. Inflation reached 8.1% in August and the central bank has raised its key rate to 16%.

IntelliNews tracks the strikes by both sides in its daily Missile War Monitor and in six public ledgers:

RUSSIA STRIKES LEDGER: Russian strikes on Ukraine's economic infrastructure

UKRAINE STRIKES LEDGER: Ukrainian strikes on economic infrastructure in Russia and occupied territory

ARSON & SABOTAGE LEDGER: Arson, sabotage and drone incursions in the EU and the UK

METAL STRIKES LEDGER: Ukraine's metals and mining assets: 2021 baseline against status in September 2026

DATA CENTRE & TELECOM STRIKES LEDGER: Data centres, telecoms, media and research sites hit in Ukraine

REFINERY STRIKES LEDGER: Russian oil refineries hit, and how badly