The Russo-Ukrainian war is getting nastier as both sides face growing challenges. That is perhaps depressingly inevitable, not least given Russia’s brutal tactics. Yet as news breaks of a since-cancelled plan to disrupt Russian civilian air traffic, Kyiv needs to maintain the clarity of its position, and its European backers need to be careful they don’t get sucked into a spiral of escalation, or even encourage it.
The plan, “Operation M&Ms”, was a pet project of former Ukrainian defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov. It entailed swarms of AI-guided drones disrupting Moscow’s airports, in the hope that this would exasperate Russia’s elite into pressuring Vladimir Putin to end the war.
Although there has been no official denial, a staffer in the Presidential Administration rejected the story. However, the journalist who reported it, Simon Shuster, is extremely well connected in Kyiv, and a British Ministry of Defence source, asked whether the operation was real, uncomfortably admitted that “it doesn’t sound unlike some discussions which were held earlier this year”.
It seems unlikely Russia’s cowed elite would risk arousing Putin’s anger because of this inconvenience (there are, after all, other airports a limo’s ride from the capital), let alone that he would change plans because a collection of fat cats were whining that it was harder for them to fly to Dubai.
A key problem is that the operation would have given the final say in targeting to AI. There is a serious risk that, even with the most detailed programming, the drones could end up killing civilians. There are those who argue that this would be a war crime.
Zelensky deserves due credit for, after allowing the planning to go ahead despite his reservations, letting the plan stall after Fedorov’s dismissal last month (his spokesperson has declined to comment). However, it does illustrate the dangers as the war drags on.
This is ugly war, notably on the Russian side. Setting aside the imperial illegality of the invasion in the first place, it has seen the massacres at Bucha, “drone safaris” where civilians are deliberately terrorised and killed, and deliberate attempts to crash the energy grid during winter.
Increasingly, they seem not just willing to see innocent casualties in their strikes, but actively seek them in the name of terror. In Friday’s “double tap” on a shopping centre in Kryvyi Rih, a second strike was calculated to catch emergency workers who had arrived on the scene after the first. This cannot be written off as accidental.
Ukraine has largely tried to stay within lines of legality and wartime morality. There have been killings of prisoners and shelling of civilian settlements, but these appear to have been local abuses rather than policy.
Even so, desperation breeds breaches. It seems increasingly clear that Ukrainians were behind the 2022 sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipeline, which German prosecutors are characterising as a war crime.
Since then, they have carried out sabotage and assassination operations inside Russia. Unwitting dupes have died, such as the man who had no idea he was driving a truck bomb onto the Crimea Bridge in 2022, or the courier hired to deliver explosives to a general’s birthday party earlier this month. When a security guard asked to see inside the parcel, it was detonated remotely.
Now, as Kyiv steps up its attacks on targets such as oil refineries and the warehouses of online marketplaces, the toll of civilian casualties is rising, even if still dwarfed by the Ukrainians’. There are growing questions about the legal justification of these attacks.
As private disillusionment with both Zelensky’s government and the continued cost of supporting Ukraine grows in the West, its moral authority remains one of its great advantages. A British MP who is an outspoken supporter of Kyiv told The i Paper that he is worried that “it becomes that much harder to draw a clear, bright line behind the Ukrainian and Russian tactics.”
Nonetheless, facing another winter bombing campaign, it is hardly surprising they are willing to take risks and skirt the limits of the legal and acceptable.
Less defensible is the way its supporters in the West seem happy to turn a blind eye and even bankroll such operations. The CIA was aware of the Nord Stream plot in advance, belatedly counselled Kyiv against it, but stonewalled the German investigation. The warehouse strikes appear to rely on Western targeting data, while Operation M&Ms was reportedly to be financed by European allies.
There is practical as well as moral hazard here.
Practical, in that such operations are not only making the Russians even more brutal in their assault on Ukrainian civilians but this may further push Putin to escalate “hybrid war” operations in Europe as they seem to vindicate his claims that Kyiv is no more than the West’s proxy warrior.
We also need to avoid dangerous precedents. Moscow explicitly invoked NATO’s 1999 intervention into Kosovo in its 2008 invasion of Georgia and the annexation of Crimea in 2014, while the US use of drones for targeted killings in its “Global War on Terror” has weakened the taboo on cross-border state assassinations.
Moral, in that we are meant to be defending the rule-based order. Outsourcing rule-breaking to Kyiv makes it no better.
It is not just crucial to maintain our consensus on supporting Ukraine. Russian sanctions busting often depends on active support in the Global South. We often fail to appreciate just how many there resent our policy over Ukraine. It is not just that sanctions regimes seek to dictate their trade choices; they note the difference between our response to this compared with other wars.
More civilians have died in the ongoing conflict in Sudan, for example, but where is a comparable effort to end the dying? Amnesty International described the response as “woefully inadequate,” while UN health chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus bluntly suggested that the issue was the race of those at risk.
The belief that we are sanctimonious hypocrites may be unfair, or a caricature, but it is a sentiment Russia – and China, and Iran, and others – gladly amplify and exploit.
It’s a difficult balance, and Kyiv’s anger and desperation are understandable, but it is in our and Ukraine’s interests not to let the apparent immediate needs of war outweigh everything else.
Hence then, the article about we re turning a blind eye to ukraine s dirty war was published today ( ) and is available on inews ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( We’re turning a blind eye to Ukraine’s dirty war )
Also on site :
- Ukraine-Russia war latest: Macron to deliver missile interceptors to Kyiv as Putin pulls ambassador from UK
- Log Cabin Republicans, un destacado grupo de gays conservadores, abandona la defensa de los derechos de las personas trans
- Iran-US war latest: Tehran warns of ‘earthquake-like’ retaliation over Trump’s ‘economic D-Day’ threats