On the evening of Sunday 11 September, a general alert was announced in nearly all the regions of Ukraine. A mass launch of precision missiles by the Russian Black and Caspian Sea fleets had just been detected.

This is not the first occasion in this war on which such an attack has happened. The difference is, the aggressor this time deliberately aimed for critical civilian infrastructure – and hit it. Within an hour, reports of explosions and fires were followed by power-failures in several regions, with two of them, Kharkiv and Donetsk, suffering complete blackouts. The water supply was disrupted, the Kharkiv metro ground to a halt (passengers had to leave the trains and make their way through the tunnels on foot), and in Poltava several trolleybuses caught fire due to fluctuations in voltage.

The long-term damage is yet to be assessed. Yet according to Kharkiv mayor Igor Terekhov, electricity and water had been restored by Monday morning, and even the city transport system was back to running as normal. Such disruptions can certainly mess up citizens’ daily lives and doubtless have an impact too on the morale of the Ukrainian people, civilian and soldier. But they are unlikely to bring much change in the direction of the war – will they regain the vast territories of the Kharkiv region, lost in just five days of the Ukrainian offensive?

Nor did the assault come as any surprise to the Ukrainian people. Back at the end of August, Vadim Skibitsky, a Ukrainan military intelligence representative, said the country well-expected civilian infrastructure to be targeted in the very near future, adding (perhaps superfluously) that ‘the enemy will try to put psychological pressure on our people.’ But, as he also pointed out, Russian holdings of precision weapons had fallen to about 45 per cent of their initial stock and in the case of missiles like the Iskander as low as 20 per cent. Such strikes as last night’s will, of necessity, be saved for special ‘festive’ occasions, an angry riposte to Ukrainian success on the frontline.

Timing can be cruel. It was bad luck for Putin that Russia’s humiliating defeat in Kharkiv was juxtaposed with Moscow’s ‘Day of the City’ celebrations. It was an incongruity hammered home by Igor Girkin (‘Strelkov’), cheerleader for the war’s hardline contingent, who spluttered:

‘This evening, Moscow, the capital of our Motherland, will be saluting the surrender of Balakleya, Izyum and half of Kupyansk with 25,000 high altitude fireworks’. 

When Maria Zakharova, foreign ministry spokeswoman, uploaded a song from the Moscow celebrations to her Telegram account, at least a thousand angry comments with an unmistakable note of ‘How dare you?’ appeared beneath it. ‘Bastards, at their money-laundering again while we struggle to collect every ruble to buy body armour for our guys at the front,’ ran a typical one. Passions – humiliated ones – are running high.

A day after the Moscow Sun – the biggest ferris wheel in Europe – was opened by Putin, it suddenly shut down due to ‘technical problems’. Muscovites were left stranded in their cabins at altitudes of up to 140 metres, free to enjoy the Moscow skyline at their leisure in the hours which followed. Shortly thereafter, the ferris wheel’s website was hacked by unknowns calling themselves the XakNet and KillNet hacker groups, proclaiming:

‘We consider it utterly inappropriate that while our guys are dying in the front, the rotten liberal intelligentsia sets up its fireworks and enjoys its idleness in the capital of our Motherland’. 

This ‘capital of our Motherland’, it will be noticed, is the same wording used by Girkin in his fireworks-tweet, and the comments may well come from the same source: namely, the radically pro-war element of the FSB and the military, putting Putin on notice that more retreat will not be tolerated.

Hence the impromptu, add-on fireworks display Putin treated his critics to last night, hitting the power-stations of Ukraine, a sound-and-no-light extravaganza needed to eclipse the capital’s. The ensuing countrywide Ukrainian blackouts were designed to satiate his detractors need for ‘totality’ and – however transient the takedown – do it without forewarning.

For some, such mayhem inflicted on their neighbour has been thirsted for a long time. As blogger Andrey Medvedev, much-quoted on Russian TV, put it recently:

‘Don’t they have power plants in Ukraine? Substations?… Nuclear power plants? It can’t be that the right people don’t know where these are situated? Maybe we need to give them a hint.‘

For telly-propagandists like Margarita Simonyan, last night’s infrastructure-bombings came as a long-awaited treat. Quoting on Twitter a famous Russian poem about ‘leaving the light on’, she taunted the Ukrainians: ‘How’s the light now, neighbour?’

Those ‘right people’ Medvedev had referred had taken his hint, it seems – even if Kremlin rhetoric about Russians and Ukrainians being ‘one people’ has now reached new depths of absurdity. As Ukraine’s president Zelensky said to Russians on Instagram last night:

‘Do you still think we are one nation with you? Hunger, cold, darkness and thirst is not so deadly for us as your friendship and brotherliness’

Like the Bucha murders back in April, such attacks will severely undermine any progress towards negotiations. They may also accelerate the arrival of something the Ukrainian army has long been calling for: ATACMS missiles for HIMARS – a piece of hardware which the head of Ukrainian forces Valerii Zaluzhny assured us would, with their 300 km (190-mile) range, end Russian feelings of ‘impunity’ for good and mark a definitive turning-point in the war.

Before then we can expect, on special occasions, more Russian attacks on civilian infrastructure or even the ‘decision-making centres’ of Kyiv’s political district. Ukrainians may respond by hitting more targets in Crimea or even – as previously vetoed by the West – inside Russian territory. All, perhaps, will be brushed off by the Kremlin as ‘violations of fire safety’. The West might – perhaps more importantly – get back to considering ‘closing the sky’ over Ukraine, at least in the form of more anti-missile systems.

As for Putin, yesterday marks a dangerous new step. A tale oft told by journalists since February is of the president in his youth encountering a rat which, cornered, leapt viciously at him. ‘You’d better not corner anyone,’ Putin said he learnt that day, ‘It may end badly.’

Caught between the hammer of the hardliners and the anvil of a military power-slump, Putin is certainly cornered this time. Yesterday was leap number one. Who it will end badly for is still anyone’s guess.