A Russian barrage of missiles and drones hit a children’s hospital, a school, apartments and warehouses around Kyiv last week, killing at least 16 people. Ukraine, lacking Patriot interceptors, didn’t shoot down any of Russia’s ballistic missiles.
Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened to expand the range of targets in Ukraine in response to Kyiv’s strikes on its oil industry. “The Kyiv regime set out to damage our economy. What did it do?
It opened this Pandora’s box itself,” he said last week. “The theory is that pain plus exhaustion produces political capitulation,” said Franz-Stefan Gady, a Vienna-based military analyst and head of Gady Consulting. But experience since 2022, “and a century of strategic bombing before that, say sustained air attack hardens societies rather than breaking them, and there is nothing in the Ukrainian data suggesting otherwise,” he said.
Ballistic missiles aren’t the only threat, Lee noted. “It’s not a 100% solution, but it could make things more difficult for Russia. Russia is building up its arsenal of jet-powered drones such as the Geran-5, based on the Iranian Shahed, and the relatively low-cost Banderol cruise missile.
“If the airspace is cluttered with drones, it could force missile launchers to hide, or push them further back,” said Rob Lee, a Kyiv-based military analyst and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. Both are cheaper than regular missiles, allowing for large-scale production, and could further stretch Ukraine’s air defenses, he said. “The effects of the long-range strike campaign on Russian society and the Russian economy would have to get a lot worse for it to be anywhere close to changing Putin’s calculus,” said Hanna Notte, a Russia expert at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, Calif. “they were less driven by the effects of the long-range strike campaign, and more worried about the lack of movement at the front,” said Notte Although a few Russian analysts have said recently that Moscow can’t achieve its war aims in Ukraine. The decisive variable in the war remains military manpower, said Gady, including whether Putin will launch a large-scale mobilization in the coming months to redouble his ground campaign. “Long-range strike is what both sides do because it is the one domain where they can still act when the ground war is stalemated,” he said. “It will get steadily more destructive without being decisive.”
