The thing that's wrong with this story is that it almost certainly gets the technical details wrong. The story could be true and false at the same time. The US Cyber Command could be up to something, but not doing what the story claims they are doing.

https://twitter.com/hrbrmstr/status/1140025113481547777

It's like the Baltimore ransomware story. Over time we've seen a picture emerge where there may also have been Eternalblue involved, but yet the claims it was primarily responsible for lateral movement taking over the network are almost certainly false.

When you have non-technical reporters talking to (likely) non-technical leakers, the important technical details get completely munged. Yet, the story hinges on those missing, unverifiable technical details.

Such stories never cover the details of what either the US and Russian power grid look like. They are vastly different from each other. The Russia grid is much more centralized. It's also much less reliable.

For example, power went out in Moscow (their capital and most populated city) for 10 weeks in 2005.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Mosc…

BTW, this isn't a "cyber" issue but a "journalism" issue. Citing anonymous government sources is always bad. It's almost always leakers trying to spin propaganda for their own political purposes rather than about informing the public. The NYTimes is notorious for this.