Ukraine's strategy of attacking Russian cities with drones is counter-productive, as Ukraine should know better than anyone.
Over the course of the summer news from Ukraine was largely focused on Prigozhin, Wagner, and Russia’s internal struggles as Ukraine’s counter-offensive has not lived up to the high expectations Western media had for it. Instead, the Ukrainian military has increasingly attacked Russia deep behind enemy lines in an effort to demoralise the enemy. There are few worse tactics Ukraine could have chosen.
The idea of strategic bombing campaigns, whereby one party in a state versus state war seeks to demoralise the other’s civilian population by bombing civilian infrastructure, has been around for as long as humans have had planes to drop bombs from. In that time it has never been successful. Consider the Blitz, it is remembered in the UK as a form of modern foundational myth; all of Berlin’s bombs couldn’t break Britain. And Britain wasn’t extraordinary in that respect, it is natural for a population to band together in tough times and a strategic bombing campaign makes for a great story about how the nation came together as the British example shows. Ukrainians of all people should know better than anyone else that strategic bombing campaigns do not work. If they did work Ukraine would have waved the white flag a long time ago.
There is also the issue of cruelty. Ukraine has been able to get the amount of support – militarily, economically, and diplomatically – form the West by maintaining the moral high ground. I’ve written before about how Ukraine could struggle to keep its support with recent disappointment with the current counter-offensive and with the slew of corruption scandals Ukraine’s military and civilian ministries have experienced recently. Bombing cafés in Moscow is incompatible with the image of Ukraine as the morally superior in the conflict; especially given that it uses the same controversial weapons as Russia, i.e. cluster munitions and anti-personnel mines. If both sides are equally cruel, why support either side?
The strategic bombing campaign also changes what Russia is fighting for. The US learned in Afghanistan that a war which is out of sight is easy to maintain. There were massive protests over the Vietnam war but the movement to withdraw from Afghanistan was a lot more muted. This is relevant to the war in Ukraine as Ukraine sending bombs into Russia makes the war harder and harder to ignore, and what was once an unnecessary war of aggression becomes more and more reasonable to ordinary Russians as civilians are being killed in their own home towns. More people will volunteer to fight to avenge real civilian deaths than those who volunteered in support of the Kremlin’s “de-Nazification” of Ukraine.
As much as I hope Ukraine will win, I have little faith in many of the decisions its military leaders have made. Bombing targets in Russia itself seems self-defeating militarily and diplomatically, not to mention cruel to a population suffering under the yoke of a brutal autocracy.
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I've always been interested in politics, economics, and the interplay between. The blog is a place for me to explore different ideas and concepts relating to economics or politics, be that national or international. The goal for the blog is to make you think; to provide new perspectives.
Written by Karl Johansson
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