By Ben Aris, Intellinews, 8/28/24

Ukraine was pounded by a deadly missile and drone attack on Monday. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was backatcha yesterday during a speech on the occasion of the Ukraine Independence Day celebrations: Ukraine has developed and successfully tested its own ballistic missile that has the range to hit Moscow and well beyond.

Only last week, Zelenskiy announced another new long-range missile, the Palyanytsia, which is named after a local bread and is a word that Russians struggle to pronounce. But they will learn how to say it soon enough if Zelenskiy gets his way. Together with the Kursk incursion, I think we can now say that the war is moving into its fifth, and most dangerous, phase.

The first was the invasion itself and Russia’s botched attempt to take Kyiv. The second was when Ukraine got its act together and Russia abandoned the north, culminating with the Kharkiv offensive. The third was the subsequent stalemate and the failed summer offensive of 2023. The fourth was the start of the drone war. And we are now into a fifth.

What are the characteristics of this fifth phase?

It seems that Bankova (Ukraine’s equivalent of the Kremlin) has taken a leaf out of Israel’s book and the US is losing control of its client. Ukraine is no longer following orders.

Until now, the US has been carefully trying to manage Ukraine’s military response to Russia’s invasion with an “escalation management” policy that can be summed up as “some, but not enough” – Ukraine has been supplied with increasingly more powerful weapons, but always too little, too late so they are never game changes. Ukraine needs some 300 state-of-the-art modern tanks and got 31. It needs some 200 F-16s and got 10. It wanted 22 Patriot batteries but had to make do with seven. And each time only after a huge debate and long delays.

The US doesn’t have a strategy other than to prevent Ukraine from losing. US President Joe Biden has repeatedly ignored Congress’ demands for the White House to lay out its war goals in a policy document despite repeated demands.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has shown amazing patience with this foot-dragging, but after more than two years, Kyiv is finally taking things into its own hands. It’s pretty obvious that the White House would never have okayed the Kursk incursion but as the frontline in Donbas starts to crumble, Zelenskiy had to do something. Crossing the Russian border should have also been crossing one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s red lines, only its turnout not to be a red line. The fact that Bankova dreamt this scheme up in obvious defiance of the White House’s wishes is in itself new.

The same is true with the request to use Nato-supplied long-range missiles on targets deep inside Russia. Zelenskiy is asking for this on a daily basis now. He even drew up a list of high value targets that he wants to hit and submitted it to the White House for approval – which predictably is ignoring it.

Fed up with waiting, and understandably outraged that Russia can hit anywhere in Ukraine with impunity, as it showed again with Monday’s barrage, while Ukraine can’t hit missile launchers parked on the Belgorod highway, just across the Ukrainian border, let alone the airbases 50km in, it’s taken things into its own hands and is developing its own ballistic missile that can strike deep into Russia, without permission from Washington. The US have already said they don’t object to the Kursk inclusion or targeting Russian oil refineries with homemade drones – as they can’t. It’s a fait accompli. The White House can’t do anything to stop Ukraine from using its own missiles to hit things far away in Russia.

And this has actually been going on for a while and the US is not happy about it. If you remember, the attacks on oil refineries started back in January when the Oryolnefteprodukt refinery in Oryol region was hit and have been escalating since then. (I keep a list of the attacks here.)

After a few months of this a semi-public row broke out where the White House asked Bankova to stop the attacks, afraid that they would drive up the price of gas at the pump, a political nightmare for Biden in an election year. But Bankova ignored the request. It hit the Omsk refinery earlier this week, Russia’s biggest.

In the end it didn’t matter as Russia reduced the amount of oil products it exported – it actually banned the export of petrol and diesel – but compensated with increasing the volume of crude exports. All that happened was the weight of refining shifted from Russia to Asia and the amount of oil products on the market stayed the same, as did the prices. The White House needn’t have worried.

Now things are about to go up another level. Up until now Ukraine’s long-range drones can’t carry more than 50kg of explosive so simply putting nets up over Russia’s refineries is enough to prevent serious damage. But if Ukraine can fly a missile carrying several hundred kilos of explosive to the Omsk refinery, that is an entirely different kettle of fish.

Bankova has come a long way from the first token attack on Moscow in March and May last year. Moscow is only 800km from the border, but last week Ukraine hit a target inside the Arctic Circle for the first time, over 2,000km away. I think we can expect some much more serious attacks on Russian energy and military infrastructure that the US will be powerless to prevent, so more red lines will be crossed. Bankova will obviously try to manage this process so hitting residential areas in Moscow is probably off the table, but major energy infrastructure assets or airfields will clearly be on the list.

Zelenskiy’s military goal will be to drive Russia’s forces back from the border like the success Kyiv already has had with emptying the Crimea of Russia’s Black Sea fleet after the peninsula came into range. And airfields will be the first to go as Russia introduced the deadly 3000kg FAB glide bombs this summer against which Ukraine has few defences, but have to be dropped from a fighter jet and only have a 50km range. Russia dropped over two dozen of these on the AFU in Kursk in a single day last week, according to Zelenskiy.

All this will freak the White House out as red lines will start to be crossed on a monthly basis, if – and it remains a very big if – Ukraine can produce enough of these $1mn-a-pop ballistic missiles fast enough. However, even a few hits will escalate tensions again – especially if Russian civilians are blown up in their beds, as Ukrainian civilians are on a daily basis. Having lost control of Ukraine’s access to powerful missiles, the White House will also have lost control of its escalation management programme.

This will only heighten tensions between Kyiv and Washington, which have, as I was writing about yesterday, very different risk profiles.

The US will worry about sparking a direct conflict between Russia and Nato. Zelenskiy doesn’t care. Why should he? An entire generation of Ukrainians have already been killed and the country is in ruins and will take at least two generations to recover if then. Zelenskiy is in this war to win. “I need ammo, not a ride,” he famously said right at the start of this war when the US offered to evacuate him.

Besides, everyone in the West – European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, I’m looking at you – have repeatedly said that they will back Ukraine “for as long as it takes” and until Ukraine’s “victory” which is clearly not the plan. The White House and Brussels will get caught up in its own rhetoric and have to support whatever the AFU decides to do.

Finally, to note that this new even more aggressive fifth stage strategy is also a race against time. Kyiv needs to make a difference before Pokrovsk falls in the next months and the first snows arrive, either of which could contribute a collapse of Ukraine’s defence. Yesterday, Kyiv reported that Russia has brought up 30,000 troops to Kursk, without weakening the Donbas frontline, who will go up against an estimated 12,000 AFU troops in the region. Even military commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi reported that the fight around Pokrovsk is not going well in his Independence Day speech.

Still, Ukraine has been fighting like a lion until now and there is no sign that Zelenskiy has any intention of giving up anytime soon. And now he has some powerful long-range missiles of his own.