Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed with members of Russia’s Security Council the measures needed to protect critical infrastructure, the Kremlin announced today, following ongoing Ukrainian attacks that hit a major military factory among other targets.

In his opening remarks, Putin asked Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak, Transport Minister Vitaly Savelyev and Construction Minister Irek Faizullin to report on the proposed measures, while the rest of the meeting was not broadcast publicly.

Ukraine used Storm Shadow missiles

Ukraine announced on March 10 that it had used British Storm Shadow missiles to strike a factory producing semiconductor devices and embedded microchips in the city of Bryansk, located just 100 kilometers from the Ukrainian border.

Following the attack, which killed six people, some Russian war bloggers expressed surprise that such a critical site for supporting Russia’s battlefield needs had not been evacuated during four years of war and continued operating within the range of Ukrainian missiles.

On February 25, Ukrainian drones struck a chemical plant belonging to the fertilizer producer Akron in the city of Dorogobuzh, reducing Russia’s fertilizer production by about 5%, shortly before the supply crisis triggered by the U.S.–Israel attacks on Iran.

Attempted attack on a gas pumping station

Russia’s Defense Ministry said yesterday that Ukraine attempted to attack a pumping station operated by energy giant Gazprom, which exports natural gas to European customers via the undersea TurkStream pipeline, but the attack was thwarted.

On March 2, the Cheskarys oil terminal, an important oil terminal on Russia’s Black Sea coast, suspended loading operations after a Ukrainian drone attack in which five people were injured, 20 buildings were damaged, and a fire broke out at a fuel terminal.

Mobile internet outages

Amid the growing attacks, Russia has slowed down or shut off mobile internet services in Moscow and several other major cities as part of security measures, according to the Kremlin.

Although such disruptions have become common across Russia during the war in Ukraine, Moscow has not experienced outages on this scale since the start of the war, leaving millions of people without access to popular services such as maps or taxi-hailing apps.