When hundreds of Russian missiles and drones assaulted Ukraine on Monday morning, Victoria Novorzhytska’s power went out first. The water supply was cut immediately after that.

She knew immediately the day would turn into a struggle. She works from her home in Zhytomyr, west of Kyiv, and no power means no work.

Russia launched its biggest ever aerial attack against Ukraine on Monday, hitting energy infrastructure across the country. More strikes landed on Tuesday morning, killing five people and raising the death toll from this week’s attacks to 12.

The Ukrainian government and the country’s major energy companies would not disclose the scale of the disruption from the onslaught, but it is clear it knocked out power for millions.

Ukraine’s largest private energy company DTEK announced rolling blackouts for number of regions on Monday, including Kyiv, Odesa, Dnipropetrovsk and Donetsk.

For people on the western outskirts of the capital, this meant six hours of darkness followed by two hours of power between 2 a.m. and 4 a.m.

The scheduled cuts add inconvenience to people’s lives, but they at least allow them to plan around power outages – so that residents of high-rise apartment blocks don’t get stuck outside when the elevators are not working, and that people charge up vital electronic devices while the power is on.

That these blackouts are already needed in the summer is particularly worrying. This situation could be far worse in a few months’ time, when demand for electricity tends to be higher in the cold, dark winter.

“The key task is to get through the winter, to provide energy supply to critical infrastructure, people and the economy,” Ukraine’s Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal told reporters on Tuesday.

Shmyhal said the focus now was on repair and rebuilding. “We do this all the time, after each Russian shelling billions are allocated (and) equipment is brought to Ukraine.”

Powering up

Ukrainians have become used to living under the constant threat of blackouts. Monday’s attack stood out because of its massive scale, but it was not unusual in terms of the means Moscow used and the targets it chose. Energy infrastructure has long suffered from Russian strikes.

In Kyiv, authorities have set up “points of invincibility,” tents and other areas where people can charge their electronics and use the internet during power cuts.

The frequent attacks on energy infrastructure have also led many Ukrainian cities to invest in solar power. Kyiv mayor Vitaliy Klitschko said the city has been subsidising the purchase of generators and solar panels by housing cooperatives and condominiums so that they can be independent of the energy network. The government has also put tax cuts and grants into place to help people get the equipment.

The vast majority of businesses, from tiny food stalls to huge shopping malls, now have their own generators, their deep rumble synonymous with blackouts.

Maksym Holubchenko, a 25-year-old barista in Kyiv said his cafe’s generator saves it from having to shut down every time there is a power cut after Russian strikes. It happens about once a month at the moment, he said.

Kyiv was hot on Monday and the thermometer on the wall in Holubchenko’s cafe showed 34 degrees Celsius (93 degrees Fahrenheit). The generator is not powerful enough to cover the needs of a normal service in the the cafe, so Holubchenko has to make compromises.

“In the winter we have enough power from the generator. In the summer we have to switch off the air conditioner and… parts of the coffee machine,” he said.

The cafe has sockets ready for customers who need to charge up their phones and other gadgets, as well as use the internet during power cuts.

Russia has been targeting Ukraine’s energy grid since its full-scale invasion in February 2022 but this year Moscow began specifically targeting power generation facilities: thermal power plants, hydroelectric power stations and even energy storage facilities.

Olha Matskiv, a legal expert at Global Rights Compliance, an international NGO that is advising Ukraine on investigating and prosecuting war crimes, said the attacks are “creating conditions inside Ukraine that are incompatible with life.”

“This is a tactic that the Russian army is using to drain Ukraine’s internal reserves, both human and financial, slowing down the country’s economy, which cannot develop when businesses are closing due to lack of electricity,” she added.

The government has been trying to fortify Ukraine’s energy network so that it can withstand strikes, first wrapping them to protect them from shrapnel and then using reinforced concrete defenses that can withstand some direct hits.

On Tuesday, Prime Minister Smyhal said the measures are working. “Dozens of missiles attacked substations on Monday and we lost a very small amount of our equipment out of dozens of hits yesterday thanks to the protection,” he told reporters.

He added that Ukraine is experimenting with huge protective structures the size of three football fields to cover bigger power stations.

“They are extremely expensive, and their economic feasibility is still not clear. The cost of such protection for six substations is 188 billion hryvnia ($4.5 billion). This is an incredible amount of money that partners are not ready to give and that is not in the state budget,” Smyhal said.

Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is halting diplomatic relations with the US and Canadian embassies after their ambassadors criticized his proposal to have judges elected by popular vote.

López Obrador announced the move during his daily press conference on Tuesday, saying the “pause” is with the embassies and not the countries. He said relations will be reestablished once the diplomats are “respectful of the independence of Mexico, of the sovereignty of our country.”

López Obrador’s proposal for judicial reform is part of a package of constitutional changes he has been seeking, which have yet to been approved. On Monday, a congressional committee approved the proposal, and it now requires two-thirds approval in both chambers of Congress.

The reforms include a range of issues in areas like pensions and the energy sector, but they also include controversial judicial and institutional reforms, which critics say would weaken the separation of powers and see the disappearance of some independent regulatory agencies.

US Ambassador to Mexico Ken Salazar said last Thursday that he believes a “popular direct election of judges is a major risk to the functioning of Mexico’s democracy.” Salazar stressed that judicial reformneed to ensure the judiciary would be strengthened and not “subject to the corruption of politics.”

The ambassador also said the move could impact the US-Mexico trade relations. The US and Mexico are each other’s top trading partners.

Canada’s ambassador in Mexico, Graeme Clark, has warned of investor worries due to the proposed judicial reforms, and voiced concern about the “disappearance” of some autonomous bodies.

After López Obrador’s press conference on Tuesday, Salazar posted a note on X reiterating the “significant concerns” the US has over the judicial reform.

Several US lawmakers also expressed their concern on Tuesday, saying judicial reform will jeopardize “critical economic and security interests shared by our two nations” including a regional trade pact.

“We are also alarmed that several other constitutional reforms currently under discussion may contradict commitments made in the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Trade Agreement, which is scheduled for review in 2026,” read a statement from the US Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee.

The constitutional reforms include eliminating several independent regulatory bodies and merging others that the government claims are duplicating functions. López Obrador is seeking to shutter the Personal Data Protection Institute (INAI). The regulator in February launched an investigation against López Obrador after he disclosed the personal phone number of a New York Times journalist.

The Mexican leader previously hit back at the criticism of his planned reforms saying that he is seeking “to establish constitutional rights and strengthen ideals and principles related to humanism, justice, honesty, austerity and democracy.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said the incursion into Russia’s Kursk region was the first part of Kyiv’s victory plan, which he intends to present to US President Joe Biden in September.

At a press conference in Ukraine’s capital on Tuesday, Zelensky said he plans on attending the United Nations General Assembly in September, where he would meet Biden. He added that the plan’s success largely depends on the US.

“The success of this plan depends on him. Will they give what we have in this plan or not. Will we be free to use what we have in this plan or not,” he asked.

He said the plan would be presented to both Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. “As we don’t know who the president of the US will be and we want to conduct this plan,” he said.

While light on details, Zelensky said the four-stage plan began with the cross-border incursion into Kursk, which he said “is already done.”

“Second direction is Ukraine’s strategic place in the security infrastructure of the world,” Zelensky continued. “Third direction is the powerful package of forcing Russia to end the war in a diplomatic way, and the fourth direction is economical.”

“Kursk region is part of our plan. The plan of our victory. It may sound ambitious for someone, but it’s a very important plan for us,” he said.

He stopped short of giving more information, saying “he can’t say everything.”

Ukraine’s surprise military incursion this month left Russia struggling to shore up its own territory. Kyiv seems to have multiple goals with the assault, from boosting morale after a torrid few months to stretching Russia’s resources.

It also raised questions on how it would end aggressions as Russia has continued to advance in eastern Ukraine and is closing in on the city of Pokrovsk in Donetsk region, where authorities are scrambling to evacuate tens of thousands of residents

Speaking at the heads of state institutions forum in Kyiv, Syrskyi claimed around 30,000 Russian forces have already been redeployed to Kursk, adding that the “figure is growing.”

At the same forum, Zelensky hailed Ukraine’s development of what he described as a new long-range rocket drone, called “Palianytsia,” which he has previously suggested was Ukraine’s “own way to take real action” amid restrictions by Western allies on the use of long-range weapons within Russia.

“Palianytsia” is a Ukrainian word for a type of bread that is typically reputed to be difficult to pronounce by Russians. Since the start of the war, Ukrainians have used the word to identify saboteurs or members of the Russian military.

As the fighting continues on several fronts, Russia launched its biggest ever aerial attack against Ukraine on Monday, hitting energy infrastructure across the country. More strikes landed on Tuesday morning, killing five people and raising the death toll from this week’s attacks to 12.

Nicaragua’s strongman President Daniel Ortega has offered to send “Sandinista fighters” to Venezuela in support of his embattled fellow authoritarian leader Nicolas Maduro, in case there is an attempt at an “armed counterrevolution” following July’s disputed presidential election.

Maduro has been under some pressure since his declaration of victory in the vote sparked widespread suspicion among the opposition and abroad. Thousands of Venezuelans have since taken to the streets in protest and political violence has killed at least 24 civilians and one soldier. The government’s security forces have detained at least 2,000 opposition sympathizers.

Ortega, speaking at a virtual summit with heads of state from other Latin American countries on Monday, offered his support to Maduro in the case of an “armed counterrevolution,” assuring him that if “battle were to come, they (Maduro’s government) will have Sandinista fighters accompanying them.”

In Nicaragua, “Sandinista” generally refers to members of the left-wing political movement, the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) that came to power in the Nicaraguan Revolution at the end of the 1970s. Ortega’s party is the FSLN.

However, Ortega didn’t specify whether he was offering up police, soldiers from the military, or pro-government armed groups that rights groups have accused of conducting crackdowns alongside the police in Nicaragua, which Ortega has denied any links to.

Ortega also criticized other leaders of Latin American nations, including Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (also known as Lula) and Colombia’s Gustavo Petro – both leftists – for not recognizing Maduro as the winner of what is set to be his third consecutive six-year term. The Nicaraguan strongman himself is serving a fifth term as president and has been accused of rigging elections in the past.

During the summit, Ortega said it was “shameful” that Lula hadn’t recognized Maduro and accused him of “dragging” himself before the US. The president made similar comments about Colombia’s Petro.

Petro responded to Ortega in a post on X saying, “At least I do not drag down the human rights of the people of my country, much less those of my comrades in arms and those fighting against dictatorships.”

According to Venezuela’s electoral council, which is controlled by government sympathizers, Maduro won his reelection bid with just over 50% of the vote. But the country’s opposition coalition, as well as electoral observers from the United Nations and the Carter Center have questioned the council’s numbers. The US, the EU and various other countries and multilateral institutions have urged Venezuela to release granular data showing the results by polling station.

A stretch of uninhabited, low-lying reefs in the South China Sea is fast becoming a dangerous new flashpoint between China and the Philippines, dealing a blow to recent efforts to de-escalate tensions in one of the world’s most vital waterways.

Over the past week, Chinese and Philippine vessels have engaged in multiple collisions and face-offs near Sabina Shoal, a disputed atoll lying just 86 miles from the Philippines’ west coast and 745 miles from China, which claims almost all of the South China Sea as its sovereign territory despite an international ruling to the contrary.

The violent confrontations came just weeks after Beijing and Manila struck a temporary deal to lower tensions that had been rising all summer at another nearby reef, where China’s increasingly aggressive tactics had raised alarm across the region as well as in Washington, a mutual defense ally of the Philippines.

Renewed tension in the South China Sea is expected to be on the agenda of meetings between US national security adviser Jake Sullivan and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi during Sullivan’s visit to China this week.

Following a particularly violent encounter at the Second Thomas Shoal in June, which saw Chinese coast guard personnel brandishing axes at Filipino soldiers and slashing their rubber boats, Chinese and Philippine officials sat down for talks and agreed to de-escalate.

For a while, tensions appeared to be cooling, but the detente proved short lived.

On August 19, in the middle of the night, coast guard ships from China and the Philippines collided near Sabina Shoal. Manila said the Chinese ships rammed into its vessels, tearing a 3.6-foot hole in one and a 3-foot-wide gap in another. Beijing blamed the Philippines for the collisions.

Then, last Sunday afternoon, another clash took place, with the Philippines accusing China of ramming and firing water cannons at a vessel from its fisheries bureau in an encounter with eight Chinese ships, including a warship from the People’s Liberation Army Navy. China said the Philippine ship “refused to accept control” by a Chinese coast guard vessel and “deliberately collided” with it.

The following day, in yet another tense encounter, the Philippines said China deployed “an excessive force” of 40 ships – including three PLA Navy warships – to block two Philippine Coast Guard vessels. Beijing said it took “control measures” against two Philippine ships that “intruded” into waters near Sabina Shoal.

Analysts say Sabina Shoal is fast becoming the latest confrontation zone in what is already a highly contested part of the world, where a mistake could quickly spiral into a conflict with hugely damaging consequences.

“All indications seem to point to the fact that this is an emerging third flashpoint” after the Second Thomas Shoal and another atoll to the north named the Scarborough Shoal, said Collin Koh, research fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.

“Manila is trying to avoid what they call a repeat of the Scarborough Shoal,” which China seized in 2012 after a long standoff with the Philippines and on which it has maintained a permanent presence since, Koh added.

China, on the other hand, is trying to see off another Second Thomas Shoal, where the Philippines ran aground a World War II-era ship in 1999 to stake its claim over the reef and has stationed a small group of marines since.

The violent clashes around Second Thomas Shoal earlier this summer occurred during Beijing’s attempts to block Manila’s missions to resupply its soldiers stationed on the rusting BRP Sierra Madre.

Resupply missions

A similar blockade is playing out at Sabina Shoal, which is about 40 miles closer to the Philippine coast than the Second Thomas Shoal. Both lie within the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of the Philippines.

Since April, the Philippines has deployed a coast guard vessel to Sabina Shoal to monitor what it said were signs of China’s illegal land reclamation activities, after Filipino scientists discovered piles of crushed corals on the sandbars amid an increased presence of Chinese ships in the area. China has denied the accusation.

Displacing 2,300 tons, the 318-foot-long BRP Teresa Magbanua anchored at Sabina Shoal is one of the two largest ships that the Philippine Coast Guard has and is its flagship. Acquired from Japan in 2022, it is also one of the newest ships in Manila’s fleet, carrying a crew of 67.

“This has really annoyed China and they want that (Philippine) vessel to go away,” said Ray Powell, director of SeaLight, a maritime transparency project at Stanford University’s Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation.

“China refers to it … as a ‘quasi-grounding,’ so they’re basically treating it like it’s the Sierra Madre all over again even though it is not grounded, it’s anchored.”

And Beijing has been gradually upping the pressure on Manila.

In July, China anchored one of its “monster” coast guard ships, the 12,000-ton CCG-5901, near Sabina Shoal. The CCG-5901 is more than five times the size of the Philippines’ Teresa Magbanua and larger than any other regular coast guard ship in the world.

“Initially the Chinese were trying to warn Manila to roll back at Sabina Shoal. That’s why they send the monster ship just to create an impression,” Koh said.

“But the Filipinos were sitting still and not moving at all. So I guess the Chinese likely have reached a point where they concluded that they need to up the pressure on the Filipinos, which is why we saw what’s happening recently.”

In recent weeks, Chinese state media have accused the Philippines of trying to establish a long-term presence at Sabina Shoal to occupy the reef and indicated that China will not allow any resupply missions to proceed.

“China will never be deceived by the Philippines again,” Chinese state news agency Xinhua said in a commentary about the Sunday faceoff, citing Manila’s grounding of the Sierra Madre at the Second Thomas Shoal back in 1999.

On Monday, the Philippine Coast Guard said it had deployed two ships on a “humanitarian mission” to deliver vital food and supplies to its personnel stationed abroad the Teresa Magbanua, including “a special ice cream treat” in honor of the country’s National Heroes’ Day.

(Teresa Magbanua, one of the heroes commemorated on the day, was one of the few women to lead Filipino troops in battles against Spanish colonizers during the Philippine Revolution and against American forces in the Philippine-American war.)

But the mission failed due to the obstruction of 40 Chinese ships, according to the Philippine Coast Guard.

If China continues to block the Philippines from resupplying the Teresa Magbanua with food, water and fuel or rotating its crew, the Philippine ship will have to sail away, Powell said.

‘High-stakes game’

For now, neither Beijing nor Malina appear willing to back down.

“It’s a high-stakes game for Manila,” Koh said. “The domestic circumstances all point to the very fact that now Sabina Shoal is where you could not yield an inch to the Chinese… Marcos Jr is definitely right on the chopping board for that,” he added, referring to Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.

Since coming to power in 2022, Marcos Jr has strengthened Manila’s alliance with the US and increasingly challenged China’s expansive claims in the South China Sea, which an international tribunal said had no legal basis in a landmark ruling in 2016.

His predecessor Rodrigo Duterte, a firebrand populist who launched a notoriously brutal anti-drug war, favored a much warmer relationship with Beijing and was much less willing to confront Beijing over the South China Sea.

Manila’s current “transparency initiative” to expose China’s growing assertiveness in the disputed waters has won it international support, especially from Western countries, but Beijing is not deterred by negative press, Powell said.

“China seems to be speeding up its agenda for taking control of West Philippine Sea features,” he said. “They have the capacity and they have the will, and they have not seen anything yet that says to them that the cost is going to be too high.”

Meanwhile, both Beijing and Manila are watching closely for how Washington will react.

American officials have repeatedly pledged to defend the Philippines from any armed attack in the disputed waters, stressing Washington’s “ironclad commitment” to a 1951 defense treaty between the two allies.

Samuel Paparo, commander of the US Indo-Pacific Command, said Tuesday that American ships could escort Philippine vessels on resupply missions in the South China Sea, describing what he called an “an entirely reasonable option” that required consultation between the treaty allies, according to Reuters.

But being dragged into another global conflict will not be in US interests, especially in the run-up to its presidential election, Koh said, adding that Washington is already occupied with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the raging war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

“The Chinese know that Manila has very limited options if they could not depend on US help,” Koh said. “China is deliberately escalating the situation, with a likely intention to test how far Washington would support Manila.”

Ukraine’s military incursion into Russian territory in the Kursk region is covering some of the same territory on which the Soviet Union scored one of its most important victories over German invaders in World War II, one that some historians say turned the tide of the war in Europe almost a year before the D-Day invasion of Normandy.

The June 6, 1944, landings on the beaches of France are often thought of in the West as the turning point in Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s conquest of Europe, but the die was cast for Germany’s defeat from July 5 to August 23, 1943, when millions of troops and thousands of tanks and armored guns did battle around Kursk, the historians say.

With victory in Kursk, “the Soviets seized the initiative in the east and never surrendered it until the end of the war,” said Michael Bell, executive director of the Jenny Craig Institute for the Study of War and Democracy at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans.

What was the Battle of Kursk?

In the spring of 1943, Hitler’s army in the east was badly wounded by the Battle of Stalingrad, where the Germans lost almost a million men in their attempt to take the city on the Volga River, rout a battered Soviet army, and capture oil fields in the southern Caucasus that could provide the fuel for Germany’s full conquest of Europe.

Soviet leader Josef Stalin ordered Stalingrad defended at all costs and German advances during the late summer and fall of 1942 were pushed back during the winter, and what was left of the German forces in the city surrendered by February 1943.

As German forces were pushed back along the Eastern Front after Stalingrad, Hitler’s generals looked for a way to regain the initiative in the east and settled on trying to pinch off a Soviet salient, a 150-mile, north-to-south bulge in the German lines, defended by more than a million men and centered on Kursk.

The generals wanted to attack in the spring, but Hitler pushed back the start of the operation, dubbed Operation Citadel, so some of Germany’s newest tanks could be dispatched to the battlefront.

This gave the Soviets ample time to prepare defenses for what was an obvious point for an attack, said Peter Mansoor, a professor of history at The Ohio State University and former US Army armored cavalry commander.

“It was pretty easy to tell that the Germans would have an interest in squeezing this bulge out of the front,” Mansoor said.

Germany would commit as many as 800,000 troops and around 3,000 tanks to take that salient.

But they faced formidable defenses.

Bell, from the World War II museum, said the Soviets prepared a series of defensive lines, dug 3,000 miles of anti-tank ditches and laid 400,000 land mines to defend the bulge, while putting 75% of its armor and 40% of its manpower on the Eastern Front in the Kursk salient or in reserve behind it.

While the new tanks Hitler wanted in the battle were more powerful than Soviet armor, Stalin’s forces had the numerical advantage, Bell said.

“The Germans have some superior equipment, but the superiority in numbers is clearly on the Soviet side,” Bell said.

Some estimates of Soviet strength in the Battle of Kursk surpass 2 million troops and more than 7,000 tanks.

The numerical advantage tipped even further to the Soviet side when on July 9, Allied forces landed on the Italian island of Sicily, opening a new front Hitler had to defend and prompting him to transfer some forces from the Eastern Front to Italy, the historians said.

The German forces that remained could not break the Soviet defenses, falling well short of objectives and never penetrating deep into rear areas.

The cost to Hitler’s forces was steep, with casualty figures ranging up to 200,000 or more killed and around 1,000 tanks lost, according to histories of the battle.

“The Germans were never able to mass forces again to the magnitude that they attempt with this battle,” Bell said.

“What Kursk did was eliminate the German armor reserves and thereby made it impossible for the Germans to successfully defend the Russian front for the rest of the war,” Mansoor said.

“After Kursk, the Germans could no longer replace their manpower losses and they lost the cream of their armored corps there,” he said.

The Kursk battlefield today

When Ukrainian forces crossed the border into the Kursk region on August 6, they had an advantage that the Germans didn’t have in 1943 – surprise.

The offensive was planned in complete secrecy, and troop movements were made to look like reinforcements of defensive positions or an exercise inside Ukraine.

And Russia was not prepared to defend that territory like it was in portions of Ukraine which it has taken, Mansoor said.

In fact, the defenses Russia set up – layers of trenches, mines, anti-tank weapons backed by artillery and armor – in parts of the Donbas region of Ukraine which it occupies are much like the Soviet defenses of Kursk in 1943, he said.

“The Russians have not changed their way of war all that much,” Mansoor said.

And that may play to Ukraine’s advantage today, said the former US Army armored cavalry officer.

Ukraine has created maneuver space inside Russian territory using combined arms warfare – successfully synchronizing infantry, long-range artillery and aviation in support of each other – something Kyiv’s forces had not been able to do before.

“It really changes the nature of the war, at least in that area of the front line,” Mansoor said.