DEEP DIVE — Ukraine fired a wave of drones and missiles at Moscow and several other Russian regions late Monday, in one of its heaviest attacks against Russia and the latest Ukrainian effort to bring the conflict to Russian territory. Russian officials said more than 140 drones were shot down, but some clearly got through; a woman was killed near Moscow and eight others were wounded in the strikes. Some missiles exploded on airport runways and set fuel depots on fire, in a middle-of-the-night reminder to Russian civilians that – much as their leader, Vladimir Putin, seeks to reassure them Ukraine is just a small troublespot, a target of what he calls a “special military operation – their nation is at war.
It was the second major drone attack against Russia in ten days. On September 1, the Russian military said it had intercepted 158 drones in a dozen regions of the country. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called that attack “terrorism,” and on Tuesday he said of the latest Ukrainian strikes, "There is no way that night time strikes on residential neighborhoods can be associated with military action."
That statement will be met with derision in Ukraine – in part because multiple reports suggested the apartment buildings were struck after Russian defenses diverted the drones, but mostly because for more than two and a half years, Ukraine has been on the receiving end of Russian attacks that have come at all hours of the day, and against residential and other civilian targets.
Given that imbalance of damage and pain, Ukraine has sought to make ordinary Russians feel the pain of war, in an effort to turn popular opinion against Putin.
"Russia brought the war to our land and should feel what it has done,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on August 8, two days after Ukrainian troops crossed the border into the Russian region of Kursk, where they now hold several hundred square miles of Russian territory.
Bringing the war to Russia
Monday’s wave of drone attacks was the latest in an increasingly broad effort to do what Zelensky was suggesting after the Kursk attack: to hit Russia where it might hurt – or at least sting a little.
The Ukrainians have fired smaller amounts of drones across the border on dozens of occasions – but never as many as in the two recent episodes, and rarely inflicting much in the way of damage.
Ukraine has sent drones to hit refineries near Moscow and St. Petersburg, and oil and rail depots and even munitions factories closer to Ukraine. In May 2023, Russian officials said Ukraine had tried to attack the Kremlin with drones that lightly damaged the roof of one of Putin’s official residences. And in August 2023, a drone attack on Moscow’s prestigious business district blew out part of a section of windows on a high-rise building and sent glass cascading to the streets, unsettling Muscovites.
Those attacks drew global attention and heightened anxiety in the typically quiet capital. They also exposed gaps in Moscow’s air defenses. But it has been difficult for Ukraine to mount strikes that carry more of an impact.
Distance is clearly a factor – Moscow is about 275 miles from the nearest Ukrainian border – and until recently Ukraine lacked enough long-range drones to carry out a large-scale attack. Experts say Ukraine has benefited from a major investment in domestic production of drone weapons, and that the two recent barrages may be a sign of more to come.
If the drone strikes have briefly shattered the complacency in the places they have targeted, Ukraine’s August 6 offensive into Russia’s Kursk region was a very different example of the effort to target Russian territory. The cross-border assault stunned locals and Kremlin officials and – although the territory in question is small – marked a turning point of sorts in the war. Suddenly the people evacuating were Russians; the prisoners were Russian; and so were the flags being pulled down from buildings.
Five weeks after Ukrainian troops breached the Russian frontier, they are still holding about 350 square miles of Russian land. Meanwhile, Ukrainians and Russian rebel groups hosted by Ukraine, have carried out occasional air strikes or raids against the Belgorod region, another area that borders Ukraine. And the Ukrainians have also struck multiple military and energy-related facilities on the Russian side of the border.
Can it make a difference?
It’s hard to know whether these disparate attacks will grant Zelensky his wish – to make Russians feel the sting of the war. And even if they do, it’s not clear how much broader impact they may have.
"Last night's Ukrainian drone attack in Moscow was just one of many over the past two years,” Philip Wasielewski, Director of the Center for the Study of Intelligence and Nontraditional Warfare at the Foreign Policy Research institute in Philadelphia, told The Cipher Brief. As for its impact, Wasielewski said that it would be limited by the fact that for the Kremlin, “the suffering of their own people plays no part in their strategic calculations.”
But the Kursk offensive has certainly stung the approximately one million people who live in the affected areas; and the same is true for the Russians impacted by the Ukrainian operations against the Belgorod region. As for the dozens of drone strikes – the latest heavy attacks especially – these have no doubt raised anxiety for Russians who live anywhere near the impacted areas. And in the case of Moscow, that’s several million people.
Recent opinion polls, taken prior to the latest drone barrages, reflect some signs of disaffection in Russia with Putin’s war.
The Public Opinion Foundation, a Russian state-owned polling group, published a survey at the end of August showing 28 percent of respondents expressed outrage or dissatisfaction with the actions of Russian authorities over the past month, up from 25 percent and 18 percent in polls conducted earlier this summer. That’s the highest level of dissatisfaction since November 2022, when Russia began mobilizing civilians and reservists to fight in Ukraine.
Meanwhile, the state-owned Public Opinion Research Center (VCIOM) noted in its last survey that Putin's approval rating had fallen from 77% to 72%.
In a rare public address this weekend – also given before the latest drone attacks – CIA Director William Burns said that “Putin’s whole narrative right now is a very cocky, very smug one. It’s ‘time’s on my side, it’s only a matter of time before the Ukrainians are going to be ground down and all of their supporters in the West are going to be worn down and I’ll be able to dictate my terms for a settlement.’ And I think what these events have done, the Kursk offensive most recently, is to put a dent in that narrative,” Burns told a Financial Times forum in London. “And it does raise questions in the Russian elite about what is all this for?”
But in his next breath, Burns added, “I don’t see any evidence today that Putin’s grip on power is weakening. He does one thing really well, and that’s repress people at home.”
Among the battlefield problems for Ukraine is the fact that Russian forces continue to press their attacks inside Ukraine itself – a slow march against the city of Pokrovsk in Eastern Ukraine, and a near-daily aerial assault against targets across Ukraine.
Another issue is the news that Russia has recently received several shipments of short-range ballistic missiles from Iran,
On Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken confirmed the Iranian shipments to Russia, and said the U.S. expected Russia to use the missiles against Ukraine within weeks. All of this comes as Zelensky and other Ukrainian officials make ever-louder pleas for permission to use U.S. weapons to hit deeper into Russia. Drones notwithstanding, that would be a far more efficient way to bring the war to Russian territory.
As Beth Knobel, a long-time Russia expert and professor of media studies at Fordham University, said in an interview with The Cipher Brief, “Putin is so far in that it would take a lot more than a couple of drone attacks to get him to back off.”
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