NYT: Strikes on Russia reduce Kremlin's ability to wage war against Ukraine

Drone attacks on Moscow and other regions of Russia reduce the Kremlin's ability to wage war against Ukraine and trigger disagreements between Russian commanders.

“Drones have exploded over the gilded domes of the Kremlin. They have hit strategic Russian air bases hundreds of miles from Ukraine. They have struck a Moscow tower that houses several government ministry offices, including the one responsible for the military-industrial complex,” Caliber.Az reports, citing an article published by The New York Times.

They have landed a stone’s throw from one of the main Russian military headquarters, where officers sitting in large situation rooms with vast screens on their walls directly oversee and manage the war in Ukraine.

As Ukraine steps up its strikes inside Russian borders this summer, it is also making plain the nature of its targets: military-aligned sites that aid Moscow’s full-scale invasion, now in its 18th month.

“Gradually, the war is returning to the territory of Russia — to its symbolic centres and military bases,” President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine said on July 30 night. “And this is an inevitable, natural and absolutely fair process.”

His tacit, public acknowledgement of Ukraine’s growing campaign to strike in Russia marked a shift after months in which Kyiv had maintained a stance of either public silence or ambiguity about such attacks.

Hours after his statement, two Russian missiles blasted a residential building and a university complex on July 31 in Mr. Zelenskyy’s hometown, Kryvyi Rih, killing at least six people and wounding 75 others, officials said — a deadly reminder that Kyiv’s mostly small-scale strikes into Russia pale in comparison to the devastation Moscow has rained on Ukraine.

Moscow has used its much larger arsenal of missiles, bombs, drones and artillery — with much longer ranges and often much bigger explosives than anything Ukraine can launch — to bombard Ukrainian cities and towns, day in and day out since President Vladimir V. Putin ordered Russia’s invasion. The United Nations said that through Sunday, it had confirmed 9,369 civilians killed in Ukraine and 16,646 others injured — and that it believed “the actual figures are considerably higher.”

Ukraine’s attacks on Russia are more than mere token retaliation, military analysts say, and could be critical to Kyiv’s broader effort to degrade the Kremlin’s ability to wage war. They could force Russian military planners to make difficult decisions about how to deploy resources and stoke already deep divisions in the Russian command.