Ukraine seeks weapons to offset Russia’s ability to strike anywhere
Ukraine’s successes on the battlefield and its apparent success sabotaging the Kerch Bridge has brought punishment to its civilians and energy infrastructure
An explosion on the Kerch Bridge connecting the Crimea peninsula to Russia led to massive Russian retaliation against Ukrainian civilians and infrastructure in the 33rd week of the war.
This has lent new urgency to improving Ukraine’s air defences and prompted Ukraine to ask for longer-range weapons with which to punish Russia.
There are also ominous signs that Russia is enmeshing Belarus ever more closely in its war in Ukraine, and could be experimenting with sabotage to European infrastructure.
The Kerch Bridge
An explosion on the Kerch Bridge on October 8 disabled two of its four car lanes and melted tracks on a separate railway span, where a train pulling oil cars caught fire.
A Russian Investigative Committee said that a truck had exploded on the bridge. Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) pinned the attack on Ukraine’s military intelligence chief, Kyrylo Budanov.
Russian occupation chief of Crimea Sergey Aksyonov said trucks were advised to move to and from Crimea by ferry. This and the necessary track repairs are bound to create delays along this vital Russian war matériel supply line.
The retaliation
The Russian response came overnight, as missiles rained down on the city of Zaporizhia in south-central Ukraine, killing at least 12 people. Photographs and video showed rubble where houses once stood and a collapsed block of flats.
Then, on October 10, Russian missiles struck downtown Kiyv with a density not seen since the early hours of the war, and pounded 30 towns and cities across Ukraine, including almost every major Ukrainian city.
Ukrainian cities struck by missiles in 24 hours on October 9-10.
Source: Ukrainian military
At least eleven people were reported killed and 89 injured in Kyiv. A nationwide casualty figure was not reported.
Russia’s defence ministry said “all designated objects were hit.” Ukrainian energy minister Herman Halushchenko told CNN that 30% of Ukraine's energy infrastructure had been struck, causing power outages and interruptions to water supply.
“It will take months to repair the Lviv thermal power plants destroyed by Russia,” Mayor Andriy Sadovyi said during a briefing. "Four substations in the Lviv region are out of order, and to put them in order, not days, but months are needed. It is very complex equipment, transformers that are not available.”
“They want to destroy our energy system,” said Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. “The second target is people.”
Russian president Vladimir Putin said he was merely retaliating for Ukrainian special forces’ three attempts to damage power lines at the Kursk nuclear power plant in Russia.
"If attempts [by Ukraine] to carry out terrorist attacks on our territory continue, Russia's responses will be harsh and in scale will correspond to the level of threats posed by the Russian Federation," Tass reported Putin as saying.
Russia has targeted civilians and infrastructure repeatedly. On September 14 cruise missiles struck flood barriers upstream of Kryvyi Rih in Dnipropetrovsk region, threatening a civil emergency.
Sergey Akysonov, Crimea’s Russian leader, applauded the return to these tactics, saying, “If such actions to destroy the enemy's infrastructure were taken every day, then we would have finished everything in May and the Kyiv regime would have been defeated."
“These are strikes against military infrastructure, the infrastructure of war. All of Ukraine’s plumbing isn’t working for civilians. It’s working for war,” said Konstantin Dolgov, a former Russian commissioner for human rights.
Russia’s ability to strike deep into Ukraine contrasts with its lacklustre performance on the battlefield. Ukraine’s counteroffensive in Kherson has recaptured 1,170 square kilometres of territory. A September 6 offensive in Kharkiv took back 8,000 square kilometres, and continues. Zelenskyy said 776 sq km of Donetsk and Luhansk had been won back in the first week of October.
But Ukraine cannot defend itself from asymmetrical threats off the battlefield.
Rendering Russia’s range ineffective
As early as July, Zelenskyy said Russia had launched 3,000 cruise missiles against his country.
Ukrainian military leaders see Russia’s ability to strike anywhere in Ukraine as its true strength.
In a paper published last July, Ukrainian chief of staff Valery Zaluzhny said Russia’s weapons had a range of 2,000km compared to 100km for Ukraine’s.
“The crucial disproportion in capabilities is decisive,” Zaluzhny wrote along with parliamentarian Mykhailo Zabrodskyi. “The enemy is capable of inflicting pinpoint strikes on targets in the entire depth of the country's territory with impunity. This should be considered as the center of gravity of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation from a military point of view. As long as this situation persists, this war can continue for years.”
Ukraine’s general staff said they intercepted 46 cruise missiles and 27 unmanned aerial vehicles on October 10 - an enormous tally for one day; but Russian forces had launched 93 missile and air strikes, and about 92 attacks from multiple launch rocket systems, meaning an interception rate of 40% - much lower than the interception rates Ukrainian forces have proven themselves capable of in the past, suggesting their batteries may have been overwhelmed.
There’s some immediate progress. Germany rushed one unit of its state-of-the-art air defence system, the IRIS-T, to Ukraine. Even a single IRIS-T is important. It has a 40km radius and can protect a city. Germany promised four of the systems on June 1.
The US has also promised at least two National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems (NASAMS) to Ukraine. Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said the US was “definitely interested in expediting the shipment," but didn’t say when this might happen.
Ukraine wants these systems, and much more. The WSJ reported that Ukraine had requested long-range rocket artillery from the US, in order to strike Russian airfields in Crimea from which Iranian drones are being launched. The Army Tactical Missiles System (ATACMS) missiles Ukraine requested have a 300km range and can be fired from the High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) launchers the US has already supplied, but only provided 80km-range ammunition for. That’s because the Biden Administration has been wary of escalating the conflict with weapons that could reach deep inside Russia.
Changes at the top
Putin’s latest management shakeup suggests Ukraine may be in for much more bombardment.
On October 8, Russian president Vladimir Putin appointed commander of aerospace forces Sergey Surovikin as supreme commander of the war in Ukraine– the first military commander entitled to hold overall command for what Putin calls his “special military operation”.
Surovikin is a veteran of the Chechnya and Afghanistan wars. In 2017 and 2019 he commanded Russian troops in Syria, where he may have been the commander responsible for indiscriminate bombing of Aleppo – when Russia was accused of “violations of the laws of war”.
Most notoriously, Surovikin was briefly jailed on suspicion of ordering his men to fire on unarmed demonstrators in Moscow during the August 1991 coup that unseated Mikhail Gorbachev – a coup he backed along with other Soviet hardliners. Three demonstrators were killed as a result.
In an article for the Spectator, historian Dr. Mark Galeotti described him as “combining competence with extreme ruthlessness. This is a man who regards terror as a legitimate, maybe even inevitable, part of war.”
As the first overall commander of the Ukraine war effort, Surovikin will now command Russia’s combined forces in the region from cruise missile-equipped submarines to long-range bombers. “That is likely to mean many more air raid sirens in towns and cities across Ukraine,” Galeotti concluded.
Ukraine has estimated that Russia is running low on precision cruise missiles like the Iskander and Kaliber, but has thousands of S-300 anti-air missiles it is repurposing to hit ground targets.
Putting the squeeze on Belarus
For the first time in the war, Ukraine is expressing concern that Belarus may be pressed to enter the war as a combatant.
"Russia is trying to directly draw Belarus into this war by playing a provocation that we [Ukraine] are preparing a strike,” Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy told a gathering of the G7 on October 11.
Zelenskyy proposed an international monitoring mission be deployed at the border to prevent any false flag operation.
Belarus president Alexander Lukashenko had announced a day earlier that Belarus and Russia were starting to use a joint “regional grouping” of troops, agreed with Putin at a meeting of the Commonwealth of Independent States, Russia’s Eurasian political club.
Ukraine’s general staff reported increased vigilance on its side of the Belarus border.
Until now, Ukrainian intelligence has assumed that Lukashenko is providing Russia with whatever it wants in return for staying out of the war.
In practice this has meant allowing 32 Iranian Shahed-136 Kamikaze drones to be stationed in Belarus, six battalions of Russian special operations forces to sit at the Ukrainian border, and the repair of damaged Russian equipment.
It has also meant sales of ammunition and hardware to Russia. Ukraine’s General Staff said Belarusian authorities removed the first batch of 20 T-72 tanks from storage and sent them to Russia on October 12. The assumption is they would be refurbished and used in Ukraine.
Ukraine’s military intelligence also said it tracked a train cargo of suspected ammunition and vehicles weighing 492 tonnes from Belarus to Kirovskaya station in Crimea, and says 13 more trainloads of Belarusian equipment and ammunition are due to be sent.