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Oil, power and strikes: Kyiv's pressured 23 February
Summary
A Slovak threat over electricity and the Druzhba pipeline landed amid Russian strikes and bombings inside Ukraine.
What did a single day of pressure look like for Ukraine, at the front, in its cities and on its borders? On 23 February 2026, three strands met: a new energy dispute with a neighbour, a wave of Russian strikes, and a bombing in Mykolaiv.
A dispute over oil and electricity
Slovak prime minister Robert Fico announced that Slovakia would suspend emergency electricity supplies to Ukraine unless oil transit through the Druzhba pipeline resumed. Slovakia attributed the disruption to Ukraine.
The pipeline's southern leg is a vital energy artery for Slovakia and Hungary. As the dispute was later described, Russian crude transit through it had stopped entirely after a Russian drone strike on 27 January 2026 severely damaged infrastructure near the Brody oil hub in western Ukraine. So the threat on 23 February came about four weeks after that damage, and it tied Ukrainian electricity access to an oil flow whose interruption Bratislava blamed on Kyiv.
The dispute arrived almost exactly a year after the 2025 Slovak–Ukraine gas dispute, which followed the expiry of the Russia–Ukraine gas transit contract. Energy supply between the two countries was again a bargaining chip.
Strikes and bombings
The same day, Russian forces launched a wave of missile and drone strikes across Ukraine. Four people were killed, among them two civilians in Odesa.
In Mykolaiv, a separate bombing targeted police vehicles at a filling station. Seven police officers were injured, two of them seriously. Two days earlier, on 21 February, a policewoman had been killed and at least 15 others injured in two explosions at a shop in Lviv; those attacks were being treated as terrorism. Taken together, the two incidents showed police being targeted in different Ukrainian cities within a few days.
The wider picture
On 21 February, Ukrainian forces had launched long-range FP-5 Flamingo cruise missiles, striking the Votkinsk Machine Building Plant in Udmurtia. Another missile hit a natural-gas processing plant in Samara Oblast. The same day, Russian forces captured the village of Karpivka in Donetsk Oblast, as they tried to advance towards Lyman.
On 22 February, the Financial Times reported that Iran had signed a confidential €500 million arms agreement with Russia in December 2025. It covered 500 9K333 Verba man-portable air-defence systems and 2,500 missiles, negotiated between Iran's defence ministry and Rosoboronexport.
What the day showed
The Slovak announcement was the one new diplomatic pressure point of the day. It did not replace the military pressures; it sat beside them. Ukraine was striking Russian industrial and gas facilities at long range while absorbing strikes on its own cities, and it now faced a neighbour linking electricity help to a pipeline it said Ukraine had disrupted. Whether the electricity suspension would take effect depended on whether oil transit resumed, a condition that remained open on 23 February 2026.
