Sky News reports on the latest shuttle diplomacy in the EU:
[https://news.sky.com/story/belgian-prime-minister-tells-sky-news-he-is-sceptical-about-ukraine-loan-using-russian-assets-13482639]
It comes as Sky News learnt from a source that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is planning to visit Berlin on Monday.
He is set to meet German chancellor Friedrich Merz and also speak with representatives of Britain and France, it's understood.
It also comes as Ukraine's deputy energy minister said that Russia has launched 1,800 missiles, 50,000 drones and attacked energy facilities 4,500 times since the start of the year.
Roman Andarak told a briefing: "There are no examples in recent history of an energy system existing under such conditions - such large-scale, targeted terror.
Well yes there is actually - after Allied bombing of German energy infrastructure during WW2 by what the Germans then called 'terrorfliegers', including the famous Dambusters raid of which Sky News' own history channel reported:
[https://www.history.co.uk/article/just-how-much-of-a-strategic-success-was-the-dambuster-raid]
The immediate damage was indeed significant. Numerous factories were destroyed, with steel, coal and armament production levels greatly diminished and massive loss of hydroelectric output. However, others have suggested this blow simply wasn’t enough to justify the deaths of airmen or, indeed, the mass deaths of civilians in the region.
It’s often forgotten that the Dambusters raid was not ‘victimless’. An estimated 1,600 civilians and prisoners of war, including female slave labourers from Poland, Russia and Ukraine, drowned in the flooding. Even Wing Commander Guy Gibson, the famed leader of the Dambusters immortalised in the movie by matinee idol Richard Todd, later mused how ‘the fact that people… might drown had not occurred to us’, and that ‘no one likes mass slaughter and we did not like being the authors of it’.
One German civilian, Elizabeth Muller, would later recount how she saw ‘trees, roads, gardens’ all swept away before her eyes, while a Russian PoW named Antonio Ivanovna reported how ‘for two to three months we kept finding bodies – they had become fat and swollen with the water. It was awful.’
So it's ironic that the Ukrainian minister has forgotten this 'recent history' especially given that his President is visiting Germany, a country that knows all about having its energy infrastructure flattened from the air.