Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed with the Security Council of the Russian Federation measures to protect Russia's critical infrastructure after intensified Ukrainian attacks that hit, among other targets, a major military plant, the Kremlin said today, quoted by Reuters, BTA reports.
At the beginning of the meeting, Putin asked Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak, Transport Minister Vitaly Saveliev and Construction Minister Irek Fayzulin to present the proposed measures, with the rest of the meeting closed to the media.
On March 10, Ukraine said it had used British Storm Shadow missiles to strike a a plant producing semiconductor devices and integrated microchips for missiles in the city of Bryansk, just over 100 kilometers from the Ukrainian border.
After the attack, which killed six people, some Russian bloggers commenting on the war expressed bewilderment that such a key facility for meeting Russia's battlefield needs had not been evacuated during the four years of the war and was operating within range of Ukrainian missiles.
On February 25, Ukrainian drones struck a chemical plant in the city of Dorogobuzh, owned by fertilizer manufacturer “Akron“, thereby disrupting about 5% of Russia's fertilizer production just before a supply crisis triggered by US-Israeli attacks on Iran.
The Russian Defense Ministry said yesterday that Ukraine had attempted to attack a pumping station operated by gas giant “Gazprom“, which exports natural gas via the TurkStream undersea pipeline to European customers, but the attack was thwarted.
On March 2, Sheskharis, a major oil terminal on Russia's Black Sea coast, halted tanker loading of oil after a Ukrainian drone attack that injured five people, damaged 20 buildings and set a fuel terminal on fire.
Amid the increased attacks, Russia has slowed or shut down mobile internet in Moscow and several other major cities as part of what the Kremlin described as security measures. While such outages have become common across Russia during the war in Ukraine, Moscow has not experienced such outages on such a scale since the start of the war, with millions of people losing access to popular services such as maps or taxi-hailing apps.