Kyiv Admits It’s Attacking Russian Territory Because It’s Losing the War

As the NATO backers of Ukraine finally accepted to admit that it was impossible to defeat Russia militarily on the ground, they began to shift operations in the direction of asymmetric warfare, targeting territory and the population in Russia proper. That has now been openly admitted by Major General Vadym Skybytskyi, deputy chief of Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Military Intelligence (HUR). He told Guardian reporter Luke Harding that victory was currently impossible on the battlefield, “given Russia’s military superiority and a shortage on the Ukrainian side of artillery shells and fighter jets”.

Therefore, he “suggested that Kyiv had ‘no choice’ but to take the fight to targets deep behind enemy lines, in Russia itself, including military infrastructure, command-and-control centers, and industrial production sites that made ‘weapons and munitions’.”

Otherwise, a prize target for the Ukraine regime is the Kerch bridge connecting Russia to Crimea, which avoids passing through conflict areas on land. According to officials of the HUR with whom Harding spoke, a third attempt to blow up the bridge, after the failure of the first two, is now being plotted. “We will do it in the first half of 2024,” one official told the journalist, adding that Kyrylo Budanov, Skybytskyi’s boss, already had “most of the means to carry out this goal.” He was following a plan approved by President Zelenskyy, ostensibly to “minimize” Russia’s naval presence in the Black Sea.

Recall that just a few weeks ago, a discussion among high-ranking German military officers about the option of using the Taurus cruise missile to destroy the bridge was leaked to the press, causing a big scandal (cf. SAS 10/24).

In addition to targeting Russian oil and fuel facilities near the border with the Donbass, Ukrainian forces launched attacks last week some 1,200 km deep within Russian borders, in Tatarstan in the Volga area. According to an official press statement, the drones “were outfitted with NATO equipment”.

The shift in strategy of the Ukrainian forces, in the face of inevitable defeat, is undoubtedly one of the factors in the serious shakeup in the government over the past weeks, the latest being the dismissal two weeks ago of four senior advisers to the President and two presidential representatives. Just days before, Oleksii Danilov, who served as secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, had been shown the door.