Drones have detonated above the gilded domes of the Kremlin. They have targeted strategic Russian air bases hundreds of miles from Ukraine. They have hit a Moscow tower that houses various government ministry offices, including the one responsible for the military-industrial complex.
And they have landed very close to one of the main Russian military headquarters, where officers sitting in large situation rooms with expansive screens on its walls directly oversee and manage the war in Ukraine.
As Ukraine intensifies its attacks within Russian borders this summer, it is also revealing the nature of its targets: military-related sites that support Moscow’s full-scale invasion, now in its 18th month.
“Gradually, the war is returning to the territory of Russia — to its symbolic centers and military bases,” President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said on Sunday night. “And this is an inevitable, natural and absolutely fair process.”
His implicit, public acknowledgement of Ukraine’s growing campaign to strike in Russia marked a shift after months in which Kyiv had maintained a stance of either public silence or ambiguity about such attacks.
Hours after his statement, two Russian missiles struck a residential building and a university complex on Monday in Mr. Zelensky’s hometown, Kryvyi Rih, resulting in at least six fatalities and 75 injuries, according to officials — a tragic reminder that Kyiv’s mostly small-scale strikes into Russia are insignificant compared to the devastation Moscow has inflicted on Ukraine.
Moscow has utilized its much larger arsenal of missiles, bombs, drones, and artillery — with significantly longer ranges and often much larger explosives than anything Ukraine can launch — to bombard Ukrainian cities and towns, day in and day out since President Vladimir V. Putin ordered Russia’s invasion. The United Nations stated that as of Sunday, it had confirmed 9,369 civilian deaths in Ukraine and 16,646 others injured — and it believes “the actual figures are considerably higher.”
Ukraine’s attacks on Russia go beyond mere symbolic retaliation, military analysts say, and could be crucial to Kyiv’s broader effort to weaken the Kremlin’s ability to wage war. They could compel Russian military planners to make difficult decisions regarding resource deployment and further exacerbate existing divisions within the Russian command.
Frederick B. Hodges, a retired lieutenant general and former top U.S. Army commander in Europe, stated that the strikes in Russia should be viewed in the context of Ukraine’s counteroffensive to reclaim Russian-occupied land in the south and east of the country.
“The only advantage the Russians have is mass,” he said. “Massed infantry and massed artillery.”
The most effective way to neutralize that advantage is to destroy, degrade, or disrupt headquarters and logistics, he added. The strikes in Russia, specifically, “create prioritization problems for the Russian high command.”
Every time a drone explodes in the heart of Moscow, the…
2023-07-31 18:00:13
Source from www.nytimes.com
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