Fair is fair. Fairer, actually, from the Ukrainian side. After weeks of Russia's incorrigibly brutal attacks on its energy grid and civilians, Ukraine returned fire on Russian soil — but more humanely. It struck a Russian oil depot early this morning and two of its military bases yesterday.
Ukraine is fighting a war. Russia is conducting a terrorist campaign. In this conflict, asymmetry applies to human decency as well as military tactics. While President Zelensky's forces abide by international rules of war, President Putin unleashes medieval barbarities of civilian slaughter.
Elation is a word rarely deployed in warfare, and perhaps its use now is as mischievous as it is malicious. Nevertheless, elated seems to fittingly describe the emotion derived from Ukraine's fatally destructive assaults on Russian ground of late.
Early this morning, the defenders aggressed, hitting an oil depot near the Russian city of Kursk, not all that far from the Ukrainian border. Sheer exaltation arrived even earlier, however, when Ukrainian drones struck two military bases as far as 450 miles inside Russia. According to one Ukrainian official, special forces assisted in guiding one of the strikes.
For months the U.S. has withheld the longest-range missiles from its matériel deliveries to Zelensky's armed forces, fearing they would strike Russia proper. So Ukraine did a kind of workaround: long-range drones. They were robust little devices, as these two enormous flashes of explosive power at a Russian airbase demonstrated.
Ordinarily I'm not one to get a bang out of military-might displays. But I did from this one, as did a few Russians. As The NY Times observes, "The strikes signaled a new willingness by Kyiv to take the fight to bases in the heart of Russia." And as Putin was motoring in Crimea, Ukrainian drones struck another Russian military base a mere 100 miles from his Kremlin office.
The attack on the Engels airfield — 8 miles from the Russian city of Saratov and 372 miles from Ukrainian-held territory — was a tactical strike on warplanes that "have played a major role in the recent bombings in Ukraine," said Rob Lee of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. The base harbors some of Putin's long-range bombers, the very ones that "have left millions of Ukrainians with intermittent light, heat or water — or none at all — at the onset of winter," notes The Guardian.
Without taking credit for the drone strikes, Mykhailo Podolyak, a top Zelensky adviser, philosophically tweeted a law of mechanical physics plus an observation on Russians' ill schooling: "The Earth is round – discovery made by Galileo. Astronomy was not studied in Kremlin, giving preference to court astrologers. If it was, they would know: if something is launched into other countries’ airspace, sooner or later unknown flying objects will return to departure point."
The enchanting Engels airfield strike propelled Russia's more notable prowar bloggers into near-paroxysmic rage. They demanded more aerial barbarity against Ukrainian civilians, of course, but they also rabidly spumed at Russia's military leaders. "The sheep in the rear continue to demonstrate their absolute unsuitability," wrote one. "Even now, the airfields with strategic aviation are not covered by air defence systems." Another prominent "milblogger" sensed keenly and rather dryly the Russian leadership's lack of — to use a military term — situational awareness: "Sometimes we feel that even if you put a bomb into these people’s pockets — they wouldn’t notice."
To repeat a common refrain, the West — specifically, the U.S. — must double down on supplying Ukraine with advanced air defense systems. President Zelensky claimed a roughly 85% success rate in downing Russian missiles and drones Monday, and yet the perpetually remaining percentage is nothing less than catastrophic in its humanitarian deprivations.
Still, Ukraine retaliates militarily only. It could be bombing Belgorodian civilians residing a mere 25 miles from the Ukrainian border. But President Zelensky's armed forces are fighting a war — they are not conducting a Putinesque terrorist campaign.