The last month has seen the fiercest exchange of missile attacks between Russia and Ukraine in more than four years of war. Russia now fires ballistic missiles at Kyiv and other major centres virtually unopposed. Meanwhile, Ukraine has hugely accelerated long-range attacks on oil refineries, strategic stores including the warehouses of online retailer Wildberries, as well as on Russian shipping in the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea.
On Sunday night, in an attack lasting several hours, Ukrainian drones hit industrial sites in Tatartestan, over 600 miles (965km) inside Russia’s borders, where a huge fire erupted in the major refinery at Nizhnekamsk, killing 13 people, according to reports.
Even so, the war is in dynamic impasse, with a huge amount of killing and damage on either side with little to show for it. Russia now looks to be trying to shake that up, and we should all be worried.
In the past week, Vladimir Putin has announced a change in the command of the Russian armed forces, urging the new field commanders to get the job done to seize the whole of Donetsk by the end of the year. He has told the new men, generals Andrei Ivanayev and Pyotr Bolgarev, their task is “critical and high stakes”.
At the same time, he has announced the appointment of Colonel General Denis Lyamin to head the new Unmanned Systems Forces, which is key to Russia’s present and future drone warfare.
While Putin still refers to the war as a “special military operation”, he has hinted in broad terms at widening the conflict. Unnamed intelligence agents were reported last week by The Wall Street Journal to be warning the White House and allies that Nato should prepare for the real prospect of a Russian land attack any time from next year to 2030.
Despite the vagueness of the report, it has been given wide credence by European media.
More precise, and to the point, Lithuania’s defence minister, Robertas Kaunas, warned a few days ago that Lithuanian and allied intelligence services thought a “false flag” operation by Russia to provoke allies in the region was probable in the next few weeks. He suggested that Russia was actively retooling captured Ukrainian drones to launch into the Baltic states from Belarus – though Kaunas stressed that he didn’t think Putin had yet made a final decision.
All of which point to a dangerous new phase of the war.
Men carry salvaged belongings after a massive Russian attack in a village outside Kyiv in February. Ukraine could experience an even worse winter this year due to Russian tactics (Photo: Ukrinform/Getty)Russia is currently using three lines of attack to break the will of Ukraine, to bring misery, a lack of power and utilities with the onset of winter and to grind down the forces on the front line.
Russian forces are attacking the main grain export facilities from the port complex of Odesa to the dockyards at Mykolaiv. Grain ships, even those flying neutral or foreign flags, have been targeted on their approach to Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Ukraine has been attacking shipping in the Sea of Azov – sinking and damaging around 250 freighters and tankers in the past six weeks. The result is that the Russian bombing of Odesa and the stranglehold by the Ukrainian maritime forces to the east in Azov has virtually stopped all commerce and trade across the region. The Black Sea is all but closed.
Crimea, the jewel in Putin’s catalogue of conquests over the past 25 years, is now short of fuel, food and water. Seven holidaymakers were killed by a Ukrainian drone on a Crimean beach last week. It’s probable that they were hit by falling debris from a Russian defence battery striking it.
The new military appointments and exhortations suggest Putin intends to intensify ground attacks in Ukraine.
Along with the missile strikes on cities and the bombing of commercial ships in the Black Sea, the renewed ground offensive in Donetsk is the third element in Putin’s playbook. It could also be a foretaste of what is to come, with a series of combined armour and drone thrusts around Dobropillya and Volodymyrivka in Donetsk last month.
Russia attacked with a swarm of drones as well as tanks protected with a new suite of anti-drone defences, the Arena-M Active Protection System. Footage surfacing over the weekend showed a column of tanks nearly breaking through Ukraine’s lines, until they were struck by a barrage of first person view drones.
It took seven of these drones to knock out a single Russian attack, and nine in another.
Russia’s new command is likely to repeat the tactic before the ground turns to mud in autumn. The combination of manned and unmanned tanks and vehicles supported by drones, missiles and conventional artillery could prove overwhelming on an otherwise stagnant front line.
The aftermath of a Russian air strike in Kramatorsk, Donetsk, this month. The next phase of the almost five-year war may be too much for Ukraine (Photo: Francisco Richart/Getty)When it comes to losses, Putin seems undeterred by the numbers game. Ukraine claims that 42,800 Russians were killed or maimed beyond active service in July alone.
This year, Russia has been losing more soldiers that it can replace in the short term. But once September’s round of parliamentary elections in Russia is out of the way, Putin is said to be preparing a new mobilisation, to get another 600,000 soldiers into the field.
Ukraine is desperate. Volodymyr Zelensky senses that time is against him getting adequate air defence missile batteries to protect Kyiv and other major cities from ballistic missiles.
Ukraine has used up nearly all its stock of Patriot defence missiles, the most effective air-defence weapons for this task. It has pleaded with allies to get more. However, the world is running short – with the US having fired over 1,700 precision-guided weapons, including Patriots, in its war against Iran.
Overnight Monday, Zelensky said that the city of Zaporizhzhia was struck by Russia using North Korean ballistic missiles and guided aerial bombs. “It was a vicious attack, calculated to inflict maximum damage specifically on civilian infrastructure,” he said, adding that six people had been killed and 19 injured.
The numbers look bleak for Ukraine going into the winter. The trashing of its cities, including the targeting of filling stations, aims at depriving Ukrainians of heat and comfort, and even adequate food. There could be echoes of the infamous Holodomor famine in the early 1930s, when Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin. That famine led to between three and five million deaths.
Ukraine is fighting back hard, but the next phase of the war could stretch it to breaking point.
Putin’s new tactics may end up working no better than those deployed over the last four years, but for Ukraine, the results could be a new phase of pain and suffering timed for the coldest and bleakest parts of the year.
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