by Ben Aris, Intellinews, 9/1/24

The Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) hit 15 regions of Russia with a barrage of homemade drones on the night of September 1 in retaliation for a massive Russia barrage a week earlier.

Russia launched over 200 missiles and drones on August 26 that mainly targeted what remains of Ukraine’s non-nuclear energy infrastructure as its own retaliation for the Kursk incursion that began on August 4.

Russia claims it shot down 158 inbound Ukrainian drones in a mass attack launched at the weekend targeting refineries and power plants in a total of 15 Russian regions, including Moscow.

Fires and explosions were reported throughout the targeted regions, but no reliable information has emerged of the extent of the damage caused. Russia has extensive air defences, but as the country is so large it remains vulnerable to attacks by single long-range low-flying Ukrainian drones. Ukraine has been targeting Russia’s energy infrastructure since the start of the drone war this January.

The first Ukraine drone strikes on Russia launched in March struggled to reach Moscow only 850km from Ukraine’s borders, but in the last week of July, a Ukrainian drone hit a Russian refinery inside the Arctic Circle over 2,000km from Ukraine.

Russian regions hit

Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin claimed that at least nine drones were downed in Russia’s capital region, but Ukrainian drones struck the Moscow Oil Refinery, in the southeast of the capital just 15 km from the Kremlin. One of the refinery’s buildings was damaged and a fire was reported following the attack, Russia’s state-owned Ria Novosti outlet reported. The sprawling refinery is owned by Gazprom Neft and one of Russia’s biggest. It has a refining capacity of over 12mn tonnes per year or more than 240,000 barrels of oil per day.

The attack on the Moscow refinery follows on from a drone strike of the Omsk refinery on August 26, Russia’s biggest, accounting for 8% of Russia’s total oil product production, which also caught fire and temporarily lost half its production capacity as a result of the fire. Repairs are already underway.

Amongst other facilities targeted on September 1 were the

Konakovo Power Station in the Tver region, one of the largest energy producers in central Russia, and three drones reportedly targeted the Kashira Power Plant in the Moscow region, Kyiv Independent reports.

Another 34 drones were shot down over the Bryansk region on Ukraine’s border. More than 28 drones were destroyed over the Voronezh region, which also shares a short border with Ukraine. In Belgorod Oblast, the border region above Kursk, 34 drones were shot down, reports Reuters, but others caused damage to houses, cars, and commercial properties, according to local reports. 14 drones targeted the Belgorod region. More drones were downed over the southwest regions of Lipetsk, Kaluga, Ryazan and Tula regions, Kyiv Independent added.

Two drones also targeted the Kursk region, which remains partially under the control of Ukraine, according to the region’s acting governor, Aleksei Smirnov.

Despite the wide-ranging drone attack, Russian authorities report there have been no casualties caused by the barrage, which underscores the relatively small amount of explosives Ukraine’s drones can carry – typically up to 50kg vs the Russian glide bombs that can carry up to 1,400kg of high explosives. While Ukraine’s attacks exclusively use home made drones, Russia has an extensive arsenal of ballistic and cruise missiles; it fired more than 236 missiles and drones at Ukraine on August 26, and Syrskyi admitted recently that Ukraine can only bring down at most 10% of the most powerful.

In what may be an unrelated incident, a large fire broke out in Moscow of government buildings on the banks of the river Moskva on August 31. A three-storey administrative building caught fire covering thousands of square metres in the heart of Moscow that burnt for several hours, Russia’s Emergencies Ministry reported. Helicopters, drones and fire-fighting ship “Colonel Chernyshev” were involved in bringing the blaze under control. There have been several reported incidents of suspected arson deep inside Russia since the war started.

Kursk inclusion slowing down

After almost a month, the AFU’s Kursk incursion is slowing down and under growing pressure. Military commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi reported last week that Russia has brought up some 30,000 fresh troops to face the estimated 7,000-20,000 crack AFU troops in Kursk. Increasingly boxed in, the AFU expeditionary force has started to take up defence positions and is increasingly coming under intense attack from Russia devastating FAB glide bombs against which they have little defence.

Separately, Ukraine’s Ground Forces report that the Russians are wiping the town of Sudzha in Russia’s Kursk Oblast “off the face of the earth” with a barrage of glide bombs. Sudzha is home to the gas pipeline metering stations that carries the Russian gas that transits Ukraine on its way to European markets and was seized by the AFU in the first days of the incursion. Approximately 200 civilians remain in the city out of a population of around 5,000.

“They are killing their own people. Even though Sudzha is located in the rear, the Russians are wiping it off the face of the earth: they are bombarding it with guided aerial bombs (GABs), artillery and kamikaze drones,” Ukraine’s Defence Ministry said in a statement, cited by Ukrainska Pravda. “On Friday, 30 August, a Russian UAV hit a local kindergarten, and enemy aircraft struck houses in a residential area in Sudzha.”

Analysts are starting to questions the assault and ask if it has been a strategic blunder by Bankova (Ukraine’s equivalent of the Kremlin) as, while a huge PR success that has lifted the morale of both the long suffering population and embattled AFU, the move has also weakened Ukraine’s defence of the frontline in the Donbas.

One of the mooted goals of the offence was to give Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy a territorial card to trade in a second peace summit that Zelenskiy has been hoping to organise in November. However, Russia’s veteran Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov dismissed that idea as “simple-minded and naïve” on August 31.

“It is very hard to tell what goal and intent they were pursuing. But political analysts are discussing it now. And even [Ukrainian President Vladimir] Zelensky said, he sometimes makes Freudian slips, that they will need this for future exchanges. That’s why they are taking prisoners and want to seize square kilometres. It’s so simple-minded and naive. We do not discuss our territory with anyone. We do not negotiate about our territory,” the minister said in an interview with RT.

Lavrov said that Russian President Vladimir Putin said a year and a half ago that Russia “is not against talks, but those who are against them should realise that the longer they procrastinate, the harder it will be to reach an agreement.”

“In Istanbul, less than a month after the start of our special military operation, compared to what we see now, it was very easy to reach an agreement. They did not want that,” the minister said, referring to the failed Istanbul peace deal agreed in April 2022 and repeating that the Kremlin will talk, but only on the “basis of the reality.”

Russia annexed the Crimea in 2014 and four regions of Ukraine in September 2023 that are now considered to be sovereign territory. Putin has been signalling that the Kremlin was ready for peace talks in July as Ukraine inched towards a ceasefire deal, but Lavrov has become increasingly adamant that that card has been taken off the table since Ukraine invaded Russia last month.

In his first comments on the Kursk incursion, Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said the AFU’s incursion is in line with Ukraine’s right to self-defence in an interview with Welt am Sonntag.

“The Russian soldiers, tanks and bases there [Kursk] are legitimate targets under international law…. According to international law, this right does not stop at the border [with Russia],” he said as cited by Ukrainska Pravda.

Tit-for-tat targets

Notably Ukraine exclusively used its own increasingly powerful drones to hit the 15 regions in Russia. Zelenskiy has been calling, almost on a daily basis, for permission to hit targets deeper inside Russia with the more powerful Nato-supplied missiles, but the White House has repeatedly refused. US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan repeated again last week that “our policy has not changed,” afraid of an escalation in the war ending a direct clash between Nato and Russia.

Zelenskiy has hinted that amongst the priority targets, should Ukraine be given that permission, would be Russian airfields from which it is launching its glide bombs that must be dropped from Russian fighter jets. Ukraine’s drones continue to mainly target Russian oil refineries and depots, but they are not powerful enough to make runways unusable.

The no-fly zone de facto imposed over Russia for the best missiles by the White House has been the subject of increasing scorn in Ukraine, where the skies remain entirely open to inbound Russian missiles, as highlighted by the August 26 barrage.

Amongst the missiles Ukraine would like to use is the Franco-British made Storm Shadow, but the US has openly refused to grant either Paris or London permission to drop the ban on their use on Russian targets.

Specifically, Zelenskiy has been asking the US for permission to use the US-made Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS), and in preparation, last week Russia reportedly moved all its aircraft back 90km from their current position in case this permission is granted. However, not only is this permission unlikely to be granted, but unconfirmed reports also surfaced over the weekend that the US have decreased the shipment of ATACMS to Ukraine as well as the size of its military aid packages. The US in the past year sent Ukraine around 200 ATACMS or about 1.4% of all US long-range missiles.

Last week, Zelenskiy announced that Ukraine has developed its own long-range ballistic missile that has a similar range and power as the US ATACMS missiles, but it is unclear if these are already in production and none were used in the September 1 attack.

Zelenskiy has also complained in the last week that despite the new $61bn aid package granted on April 20, promised supplies to Ukraine are coming too slowly and reports from the frontline in Donbas say that the AFU is again running very short of ammunition and men. As bne IntelliNews reported, the US continues to follow its “some, but not enough” weapons supply policy that is part of its “escalation management” policy, designed to prevent Ukraine from not losing the war, but not supplying it with enough to win.

Donbas front collapsing

The pace of the collapse of Ukraine’s position on the frontline in Donbas appears to be accelerating. Intermittent battlefield reports by military bloggers (milbloggers) say the situation is becoming increasingly desperate as the Armed Forces of Russia (AFR) presses ahead with its assault especially for the key town of Pokrovsk and is making increasingly rapid progress. As bne IntelliNews reported, Zelenskiy’s Kursk incursion gamble appears to be unravelling.

“‘I’ve never seen such speed [in a Russian advance],” the commander of a Ukrainian aerial reconnaissance unit fighting in the area told The Telegraph’s correspondent Roland Oliphant in an interview last week.

‘It is very rapid. And our problem is the same: we don’t have infantry, we don’t have enough artillery or shells. We don’t have enough drones… The situation is very complicated, and not in our favour. The most critical thing for us now is the large number of soldiers of the Russian Federation. They outnumber us I reckon by at least five to one”.”

Zelenskiy has faced mounting criticism from his own officers and soldiers in the last few days as if the goal of the Kursk incursion was to relieve the pressure on the Donbas frontline by drawing off forces to retake Kursk, then Syrskyi admitted last week that has not worked and ironically Bankova has weakened its own defences by withdrawing crack troops from the defence to man the incursion at a critical juncture in the war.

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.

On September 1st, 1983, a civilian Korean Airlines Flight (007) is shot down by a Soviet fighter jet for violating Soviet airspace. Because of a fatal mistake before take off, all 269 passengers on board tragically died. Tensions between the US and the Soviet Union were extremely high at this point.

Because this program was made well after the end of the Cold War, the Soviet fighter pilot who actually shot down flight 007 is interviewed.

From the Mayday: Air Crash Investigation series.

YouTube link here.