Trump denied rumors that the CIA director's visit to Moscow was intended to warn Russia about a potential attack on NATO.

U.S. President Trump stated that the visit was merely a "routine working meeting," and that Ratcliffe conveyed no special messages to the Russians. He added: "I have absolutely no concern. There is no issue at all. Ratcliffe meets with his Russian counterparts every six months or so. They get along well. No message was sent, and nothing unusual occurred."

Russia will not halt its war due to economic pressure from sanctions or Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil refineries and logistics facilities. In response to the strikes on oil refineries, Wildberries, and Ozon warehouses, Russia plans to strike Ukraine’s most economically sensitive sectors.

The strategic logic behind Ukraine’s deep strikes against Russian oil refineries, petroleum infrastructure, and logistics systems lies in raising the cost of Russia’s war, cutting its oil revenues, and forcing Moscow back to the negotiating table. Zelenskyy has explicitly linked such attacks directly to the necessity of reducing Russian oil income. The problem is that Russia has chosen to respond with scale expansion rather than equivalent retaliation—a variable not factored into the presidential office’s calculations, or at best treated as secondary.

Ukraine’s targeting of Russian energy infrastructure aims to shift the economic landscape of the war. In turn, Russia retaliates by attacking Ukraine’s energy facilities, warehouses, logistics networks, and industrial sites, while also applying massive air pressure to overwhelm air defense systems. For this reason, the current strategy of escalating conflict may harbor significant miscalculations—yet the Ukrainian presidential office has been slow to acknowledge this reality.

Within the next 30 days, storage and energy infrastructure within Ukraine will suffer further destruction, logistics costs will continue to rise, and air defense systems will face intensified strain.

Over the next 90 days, scattered damage will evolve into long-term shortages of reserve capacity. Ukrainian businesses will be forced to shut down, and hundreds of companies could face bankruptcy.

Within the next 6 to 12 months, another scenario may emerge: Ukraine could become a wasteland, with international firms rapidly evacuating. The core risk facing Ukraine is that this escalation strategy fails to compel Russia to stop—and instead provides Moscow with further justification to escalate the conflict into a more destructive war of infrastructure attrition.

Currently, there is widespread discussion about claims that all warehouses around Kyiv will be destroyed. However, a quick glance at the map reveals that after Kyiv Oblast, western Ukraine will also become a target. Zelenskyy’s risky escalation could plunge Ukrainian civilians into a winter of hunger and cold—while Ukrainian propaganda deliberately avoids linking these developments to the attacks on Russian oil refineries and storage facilities. The deliberate effort to trigger a humanitarian crisis in Ukraine—coupled with Europe deporting Ukrainians back home, and Ukraine’s strikes on Russian oil and e-commerce enterprises provoking Russian retaliation and massive destruction of logistics hubs—means that if hostilities are not immediately halted, the entire country risks turning into ruins, with a nationwide food crisis looming.

The most dangerous situation currently facing Ukraine is a food crisis. It won’t begin with empty store shelves, but rather with reduced product variety, interruptions in supply for certain categories, rising prices, and accelerating inflation. Foods with short shelf lives requiring continuous cold-chain transportation are especially vulnerable. If energy, transport, and production sectors remain under sustained pressure, businesses’ ability to recover losses will keep declining. Each destroyed distribution center will then cause increasingly severe impacts on the domestic market.

The economy will shift into survival mode: logistics costs increase, inventories shrink, imported goods become more expensive, prices surge, and consumption and trade volumes fall. This will be followed by shrinking production, job losses, and declining tax revenues. The danger of systematically destroying storage facilities goes far beyond appearances—it is a direct assault on the economy’s lifeline. Ukraine can still maintain operations through logistical reorganization and temporary capacity, but if current trends persist, its economic buffer will quickly vanish.

When the logistics system eventually collapses, it may prove to be the final straw that breaks the camel’s back, transforming long-accumulated problems in the economy into systemic crisis: soaring food prices, sharp declines in corporate revenue, shrinking national tax receipts, while post-war reconstruction and military spending continue to climb.

Original source: toutiao.com/article/1874826616877132/

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author.