The Russian military has acknowledged that a Ukrainian drone threatened one of its military installations yesterday — the Engels airbase, about 300 miles inside Russian territory. The drone was shot down, but its wreckage also rained down on three soldiers, now dead. The airbase houses bombers used to fire cruise missiles into Ukraine, which no longer fears retaliatory escalation.
So it's been directly confronting Vladimir Putin's fatherland. "If the Russians thought that no one at home would be affected by the war, then they were deeply mistaken," said Col. Yuriy Ihnat of the Ukrainian Air Force.
Monday's drone assault was Ukraine's third this month. On 5 December it attacked the Dyagilevo military base, roughly 100 miles from Moscow, and on that day came its first strike on the Engels airfield.
Although the Kremlin repeatedly promises "dire consequences for attacks against Russia," notes The NY Times, Ukrainian authorities have concluded that the Russian army is already exhausting what force it has. In a mid-December Bloomberg interview, Ukraine's security chief, Olekskiy Danilov, estimated that Russia was capable of only three or four more missile barrages. Hence Ukraine sees "little risk of Moscow’s escalating its war in retaliation."
Said retired colonel Serhiy Hrabskiy, "Russia stated many, many red lines regarding further escalation." But, "there is no reaction. Why? Because the Russians simply do not have capacity to do so."
The Biden administration, however, remains paralyzed in neurasthenic knots at the impossible prospect of WW III should Ukraine do to Russia what Russia has been doing to Ukraine for more than 10 months. The Russia-Ukraine war is asymmetric in theory as well as weaponry. The U.S. believes Putin is crazy enough to use his nuclear capability on Ukraine, while Ukraine knows he will not for fear of spearheading the very thing that most terrorizes the U.S.: a Third World War.
Putin may indeed unleash radioactive dirty bombs in Ukraine; he might even detonate a nuclear weapon over the Black Sea as a demonstration of his country's ultimate power. But he will not commence the utter destruction of his beloved Russia. He's sociopathic; not suicidal.
Nevertheless, along with battle tanks and fighter jets, the Biden administration continues to withhold long-range precision missiles. It also demands that the missiles it does provide to Ukraine cannot be used to attack Russia proper, although Putin possesses no scruples when it comes to massacring Ukrainian women and children with his missiles and Iranian drones — more mind-bending asymmetry of warfare on display.
As the Times observes, "The Ukrainian attacks have been pinpricks compared to the widespread devastation Russia has wrought against Ukraine. But the strikes have boosted Ukrainian morale, damaged some Russian warplanes and infrastructure, and pierced the air of normalcy the Kremlin has tried to maintain for most of its people."
The strikes are also infuriating the fatherland's prowar fanatics — some, at high levels in the rancid hierarchy of the Russian Federation. They were already dyspeptic over Russia's battlefield losses; now they're wrathfully asking why their nation is so exposed to Ukrainian attacks. All of which piles more heat on Putin.
Thus Ukraine is likely to persist in assaulting Russia proper, notwithstanding U.S. opinion. And by the end of Ukraine's spring offensives — which will be even costlier for Russia's armed forces, as it were — even the war hawks might be begging Vladimir Putin to quit.