“We are currently evacuating a large number of villages, and now we are planning to evacuate about 9,000 children from Belgorod, Belgorod district, Shebekino district, and Graivoron district,” the governor of Belgorod announced today. “We are making arrangements with our colleagues.”
Despite Russian propaganda claims that the attacking units were all destroyed on the first day, Vyacheslav Gladkov spoke on the seventh day of cross-border attacks by the Legion of Freedom of Russia and the Russian Volunteer Corps. ‘Free Russia’ forces issued an evacuation warning to residents of the region on the second day of operations. They have been firing on “military targets” ever since.
Videos posted by area residents on Telegram show damaged houses and cars in Belgorod, as well as a military base on fire at Razumnoye and smoke inside a rocket engine factory. Freedom of Russia Legion has released first-person viewer (FPV) drone video of attacks on a Russian sensor tower, artillery systems, ammunition storage sites, and other targets.
Although this incursion has crossed a much-ballyhooed “red line” for the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin has yet to launch nuclear weapons at anyone over it. Coupled with Ukraine’s increasingly aggressive campaign against Russian oil refineries, this is a damning indictment of the Washington policy-makers who slow-walked the delivery of combined arms kit to Ukraine out of fear that Putin would do something crazy.
Of course, Ukraine is simply flipping the hybrid war script here by using Russian citizens. While Kyiv is supplying the incursion by helicopter, however, the ‘Free Russia’ forces are apparently equipped with Polish variants of the T-72, and their previous incursion last year was reportedly supported by “Polish volunteers.”
It remains unclear just how substantial the incursion force is, or how long they intend to stay across the border. Logistics will likely limit their ambitions. Video this morning of Kozinka, a border village where the first reported fighting took place a week ago, shows heavy damage. ‘Free Chechen’ leader Shamil Zakayev posted a video from the election polling station at a high school in Gorkovsky yesterday, claiming that “we are holding it for the third day.”
“As you can see, the polling station is open,” Zakayev quipped. “Everyone is welcome to vote.” The timing of this incursion is not mysterious: the ‘Free Russia’ forces are spoiling Putin’s re-election. When residents of Belgorod are being evacuated, or posting videos to complain about empty stores or damage to civilian structures, it is an embarrassment to the incumbent dictatorship. Putin is failing to protect Russia.
Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil infrastructure have shifted from temporary storage tanks to the crude distillation units (CDUs) that make gasoline and other fuels. Each CDU is roughly the size of a barn silo. They are not made in Russia, so they will be hard to fix and expensive to replace. Russia is too big to effectively cover in a blanket of tactical air defenses or electronic warfare systems, thus Ukrainian drone sorties now reach as far as 1000 km to hit these targets.
A Ukrainian defense website wonders “what technological solutions make it possible to ensure such a good accuracy of Ukrainian drones hitting Russian refineries, especially at such a long distance.” One answer is precision satellite navigation. “But wait,” I hear the reader cry. “Won’t the Russians just start jamming GPS and Starlink signals around their oil refineries?” This is true. Also, Velery Gerasimov will have to start putting more anti-aircraft and anti-drone systems around those refineries instead of deploying them to the battlefield in Ukraine. See how that works?
A second answer is Russians themselves are helping, sometimes wittingly, sometimes not, by supplying target coordinates and other information. Ukraine has cultivated assets in Russia for a long time, and carried out some spectacular attacks on Russian logistics, such as the Severomuysky Tunnel bombing late last year. Cardboard drones appear deeper in Russia than their range allows, suggesting that someone has smuggled them into the Russian Federation. Despite the war, it is still possible to travel from Kyiv to St. Petersburg on a connecting bus or train.
The CDU strikes are clearly having economic effects. Russian export bans on gasoline and other refined fuels reflect the supply crunch created by even a few successful refinery strikes. As supply goes down and demand remains, domestic prices rise, and the cost of everything made using fuel goes up as well. Putin’s central bank already faces monumental inflationary pressure. To make matters worse, the Ukrainians are building more drones than ever.
We have a suitable historical parallel in the second allied bombing campaign against the Ploesti oilfields. When American bombers started hitting “Hitler’s gas station” in Romania once again during April 1944, they immediately reduced fuel exports to Germany by half during the month after. Production bounced back quickly, as it had the first time Americans struck Ploesti, but this time the Americans were persistent. Altogether, the 8th Air Force flew 20 missions against the refineries, the RAF four, losing close to three hundred aircraft and almost 1,000 air crew, awarding seven Medals of Honor. By the time Soviet troops took control of Ploesti at the end of August 1944, production was at 20 percent. Hitler’s war machinery ground to a halt.
None of that sacrifice is necessary for Ukraine to drone-bomb the crap out of Russian oil infrastructure, though. They are sending only machines to die — and again, the machines are multiplying, which creates new dilemmas for Russian resource allocation. See the above photo of the $33 million helicopter chasing down a $3,000 drone.
“Germany faced exactly this dilemma in World War II,” military historian Phillips O’Brien writes at his Substack. “It was so desperate to defend its oil production that it eventually started diverting massive amounts of anti-air to defending it.” (O’Brien literally wrote the book on this topic.) “By 1943, for instance, there was far more anti-air forces defending German home production of vital industries, than there was on the entire Eastern Front. And by 1944 there was more German money spent on anti air systems and ammunition than there was on tanks.”
Nothing is guaranteed, but it is a winning strategy, which is more than anyone has come up with in Washington, DC.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin says that no matter what Congress is doing, the United States will not let Ukraine lose the war. Which is better than nothing, but still far short of committing to victory.
According to the reigning conventional wisdom of Washington, DC, actual victory is impossible, and also dangerous. Aid packages and choices of equipment have been optimized for not-losing rather than actual winning, because if Ukraine wins, Putin will start throwing nukes around. They have let the Kremlin get inside of their heads. Since the Cold War, Russian deception doctrine has called this “reflexive control.” It is a propaganda strategy “specifically aimed at manipulating and undermining a state’s decision-making process.”
It if has worked on the Americans, any effect on the Europeans seems to have worn off. If the enemies of aid for Ukraine really thought they were making the world safer and the war shorter, their strategy has utterly backfired. Because they are no longer paying the piper, the government of the United States no longer gets to call the strategic tune. The powers now replacing the vacuum of American leadership are far more aggressive, for they are much closer to the history of Russian imperialism.
The Czech Republic is set to provide Kyiv with more ammunition this year than the US, earning a corresponding boost in influence. French president Emmanuel Macron is leading Europe towards more direct support, even refusing to rule out NATO troops in Ukraine. Washington policy apparatchiks who worried themselves into irrelevance should rather worry now about a world in which Ukraine wins without them.