For more than two years, Russia has bombarded Ukrainian towns and cities from the skies. Russian missiles and drones have destroyed Ukrainian hospitals, high-rise apartment blocks and children’s playgrounds. The entire country is regularly placed on air-raid alert. Ukrainian civilians have learned to look up and anticipate terror from above. Now those tactics are coming home.
Late on 9 September, hundreds of long-range attack drones swarmed across the border into multiple regions of western Russia. A wave of them reached the outskirts of Moscow, closing three of the capital’s four major airports and damaging suburban blocks of flats. Witnesses posted videos on social media of fires burning in high-rise buildings and explosions in the night sky. The Russian authorities said a 46-year-old woman was killed in a strike on the suburb of Ramenskoye. The Russian ministry of defence claimed to have shot down 144 drones overnight. (At the time of writing, Ukraine’s military had yet to comment.)
These strikes are part of a broader shift in Ukrainian strategy as Kyiv seeks to take the war into Russian territory, with long-range drone strikes on oil refineries, airfields and power plants deep inside the country, and a large-scale incursion into the Kursk region in south-western Russia. The Kursk offensive, which began on 6 August, appeared to catch Russian border units off guard, as Ukraine forces captured hundreds of Russian soldiers and a significant swathe of Russian territory. It was the first time since the Second World War that a foreign army had invaded Russia. As Oleksandr Syrskyi, the top commander of Ukraine’s military, explained the rationale in a recent interview, “We moved the fighting to the enemy’s territory so that [they] could feel what we feel every day.”
The conventional wisdom holds that these attacks will embarrass Vladimir Putin, who has demonstrably failed to protect the motherland and brought these attacks on his citizens with his unprovoked assault on Ukraine. With Ukrainian drones falling from the skies, the Russian public will no longer be able to tune out the war, and pressure will build on Putin to bring an end to the fighting. Kyiv will also be able to reclaim the momentum on the battlefield, by waging asymmetric attacks on its numerically superior opponent, and forcing Russia to redeploy men and materiel to protect its own borders and cities, stalling the Russian advance. This, in turn, will boost morale at home and convince Ukraine’s wearying Western partners that this war can still be won.
It is an almighty gamble. The first risk is that rather than turning against Putin, Russian support for the war solidifies. Putin launched his invasion in 2022 against a phantom enemy. There was no threat to Russian civilians from Ukraine back then. Now, Russian television shows terrified citizens being evacuated from the border regions and fires burning in the capital. The most serious pressure on Putin at home is not from those who want an end to the war – the early protests were crushed and anti-war activists locked up – but from pro-war bloggers and Russian nationalists, who want the president to go much further in his assault on Ukraine. These attacks will only strengthen those calls.
Then, there is the message this sends to Ukraine’s Western backers. The Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and his top officials are actively lobbying the US and Nato allies for permission to use Western-supplied missile systems for long-range strikes inside Russia. They want the restrictions on these targets lifted so that the Ukrainian military is no longer forced to fight with one hand effectively tied behind its back. But what if those weapons are used against Moscow? What if American or British missiles are fired at the Kremlin. Zelensky does not appear to have consulted his foreign partners before he invaded Kursk. How can they be sure he won’t be tempted to seize the initiative again if the opportunity presents itself?
Yet what other choice does Zelensky have? He can please his Western interlocutors by continuing to play by their rules as more Ukrainian citizens are killed and more territory lost. Or he can do what he has done since the start of this war – defy the sceptics by attempting to overcome the seemingly impossible odds and outmanoeuvre his enemies. Rather than accept a grinding attritional war, and the slow slide towards a negotiated defeat, Zelensky and his generals are attempting to shift the battlefield and rewrite the rules of engagement. Putin has long calculated that he can withstand the pain of this war longer than Ukraine and the West. These strikes, and Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk, are intended to show that he is wrong – that Russia’s war is coming home.
[See also: Those delighting in the EU’s decline should be careful what they wish for]
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