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December 23, 2024 - 8:00am
Yesterday, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned: “Whoever, and however much they try to destroy, they will face many times more destruction themselves and will regret what they are trying to do in our country.” Those ominous words came the day after Ukraine launched a major drone attack against the Russian city of Kazan, 1,000 kilometres from the war’s front line, with six UAVs hitting residential buildings and a seventh striking an industrial facility.
Drone warfare has been an important and regular feature of this conflict. The immediate context for the Kazan attack is a tit-for-tat. On Friday, Russia attacked Kyiv with ballistic missiles and also fired missiles and drones at other Ukrainian cities, while on the same day Ukraine launched a missile attack on the Russian border town of Rylsk. While Kazan may be far from the front line, it is not an entirely surprising choice: as recently as April, UAVs struck targets in the Tatarstan region in which the city is located.
So why did Putin make such bellicose threats regarding Kazan, especially when the attack did not claim any lives? It may have been simply that he was, at the time, addressing the Governor of Tatarstan by video link and so felt compelled to provide public reassurance. Yet the Ukrainian drone strike temporarily shut down Kazan International Airport and led to all mass gatherings being cancelled in a city that holds considerable commercial and symbolic significance — only two months ago, Putin welcomed world leaders there for the Brics summit to demonstrate he was anything but diplomatically isolated.
Additionally, by hitting a luxury residential building, the Kazan attack interfered with Putin’s long-term strategy of maintaining domestic stability by keeping the war far from the cosseted, secure lives of the country’s elites. An attack so far inland might therefore have felt a little too close to home for the Kremlin in more senses than one.
This latest incident is symptomatic of a recent surge of boldness on Ukraine’s part, coming after the assassination of Russian general Igor Kirillov in Moscow last week. That hit, provocative and slickly executed, allowed Ukraine to grab headlines and project an image of strength at a time when Russia is making territorial gains and Kyiv faces the prospect of a deal in which it is poised to lose significant amounts of land.
There are other, more specific reasons as well. Although Ukraine has engaged in targeted killings before, Kirillov was the highest-ranking target yet, his death a warning to other senior Moscow military figures that they may face similar retribution. Yet, underlying this, the simple reason why the Ukrainians killed Kirillov is that they wanted to. Any fear sowed amongst the Russian officer class was a by-product of an abiding thirst for revenge against a man whose order to use banned chemical weapons against Ukrainian servicemen had placed him high on Kyiv’s list of enemies.
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Subscribe“such tactics come from a position not of strength but of weakness”
True; a weakness largely created by the West failing to stand up to Putin in 2014 and under-resourcing Ukraine since then.
Stop this catastrophe *now*.
“Ukraine is looking to wreak havoc however it can and while it still can“
So can we finally take down all those silly flags now please? Or do we want to keep on showing half-hearted support for indiscriminate attacks on residential buildings, the slaughter of innocent men, women and children, and state-sponsored murder?
Let me be the first to comment.