Twice in the last week a tank with nitric acid exploded after artillery fire in Rubishne in eastern Ukraine.

Images from around the city showed a yellowish-orange cloud rising and darkening the sky.

Local authorities urged residents to stay in shelters, seal doors and windows as much as possible, and cover their mouths and noses if possible.

The fumes from nitric acid can burn the respiratory tract and mucous membranes and severely damage the eyes.

Reinhard Veser

Editor in Politics.

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Rubishne in the Luhansk region has been heavily contested for weeks.

It cannot be ruled out that the nitric acid tanks were accidentally hit.

But the hits fit into the picture of Russian warfare aimed at making the situation for Ukrainian civilians unbearable.

This happens not only through the shelling of refugees as in Kramatorsk or massacres as in Bucha and other places temporarily occupied by the invaders, but also through the destruction of civilian infrastructure throughout the country.

Very different targets are hidden under this abstract term: hospitals, fertilizer stores, food stores, oil refineries, power plants, power lines, fuel depots.

What they have in common is that they are necessary for the normal functioning of a modern society.

Destroyed camps in Odessa

This becomes particularly clear in the example of the energy supply, which has been attacked in all parts of Ukraine in recent weeks.

The shelling of fuel depots has an obvious military purpose: it makes it more difficult to supply the Ukrainian military in the east.

In the past few weeks, fuel depots and refineries have been destroyed from western Ukraine near Lemberg, Lutsk and Rivne via the Zhytomyr region to Poltava, Kremenchuk and Dnipro in the east - i.e. along the route on which diesel and petrol reach the Ukrainian troops in the regions in the east, on which fighting is now concentrated.

Before the war, Ukraine imported much of its fuel through the port of Odessa, which is now blocked by the Russian Navy.

And also in Odessa, warehouses and a refinery were destroyed by shelling.

So there is only one practicable supply route left: with tankers by train or truck from Poland.

In the West, as in Ukraine, it is expected that the Russians will attack these transport routes.

However, the strikes against the energy supply are not only aimed at the military.

"The main thing is to make Ukraine uninhabitable," says Viktoria Wojzizka, who is responsible for energy issues in a new coalition of Ukrainian NGOs called the Center for Ukrainian Victory;

as a Member of Parliament, she chaired the Energy Committee from 2014 to 2019.

According to their calculations, on April 1, around one million people in Ukraine were cut off from electricity.

Since then, the situation is likely to have gotten even worse given the constant rocket attacks.

In addition, since the beginning of March, the Russian armed forces have controlled the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, which produces about a quarter of Ukraine's total electricity.

Fuel isn't just critical for the military

Uncertainty of energy supplies is hitting the efforts of the Ukrainian government and society to keep the country's economy afloat in areas not affected by fighting and to secure the supply of food and other basic necessities throughout the country.

The immediate consequence will probably be that in the coming months many people will also leave Ukraine because they no longer have any opportunity to earn money, while the supply situation will become increasingly difficult.

This will have indirect long-term consequences, because economic reconstruction after the end of the war will become all the more difficult the more companies are now going out of business.

Fuel is central not only to the military, but also to the viability of Ukrainian agriculture.

Because not only tanks, but also tractors and combine harvesters need diesel.

If it is missing, it will hardly be possible in summer to bring in the harvest from the areas where sowing is still possible.

Energy is also required for proper storage and transport of the harvest.

Presumably, the impact on agriculture is not an unintended side effect of the attacks on energy supplies: the Russian army also hits them directly by shelling fertilizer depots.

The local authorities in a place in western Ukraine reported last week that the groundwater and the drinking water supply were endangered by a rocket hitting a tank with liquid fertilizer.

If it is not possible to secure the energy supply, there is a risk of even more such side effects - after all, sewage treatment plants also need electricity.

The extent of such ecological consequences of the war cannot yet be estimated.

But hits on chemical plants like the one in Rubishne are already having an indirect effect like chemical attacks on the civilian population.

In Rubishne, however, the attackers miscalculated on Saturday: "The Russians cannot fight," wrote the governor of the Luhansk region, Serhiy Hajdaj, on Facebook a few hours after the attack with a certain glee: "They didn't even calculate the wind direction.