Ukraine Has The Weapons To Attack Moscow, But Ukrainian Leaders Probably Know Better

When Ukrainian drones struck a pair of Russian air force bomber bases more than 300 miles inside the Russian border, they didn’t just inflict significant damage to at least two bombers.

They also sent a message: Ukraine now has the technological means to strike Moscow, 250 miles from Ukraine.

“This doesn’t mean at all that Ukraine is going to attack Moscow,” Mick Ryan, a retired Australian army general, wrote in his newsletter. In fact, there are good reasons why Kyiv would refrain from targeting Moscow.

But the possibility of a strike on the sprawling city “will cause some sleepless nights in the capital,” Ryan wrote.

Attacking Moscow would represent a major escalation of Ukraine’s months-long campaign of deep strikes, which so far has concentrated on air bases, bridges and logistical targets, many of them behind Russian lines on Ukrainian territory the Russians occupy, and most of the rest inside Russia within 50 miles or so of the border.

But raids on the Russian capital would be fair play. Russian forces after all have been bombarding Kyiv, as well as other Ukrainian cities, since Russia widened its war on Ukraine starting in late February.

Indeed, Russia retaliated for the Monday morning strikes on the Russian bomber bases at Dyagilevo and Engels, respectively 100 and 400 miles southeast of Moscow, by launching a powerful raid involving at least 14 Tupolev Tu-95 bombers carrying long-range cruise missiles targeting “communication centers, energy and military units of Ukraine,” according to the Kremlin.

There’s no shortage of potential strategic targets in Moscow. And Ukraine has several ways of carrying out strikes. The simplest, but riskiest for the attackers, would be human sabotage.

It’s worth noting that Ukrainian saboteurs back in October traveled 500 miles into Russia to blow up a Russian air force attack helicopter on the ground at a military airfield. According to The New York Times, Ukrainian commandos were on the ground in Russia helping to guide Monday’s raids.

The alternative to sabotage is a drone strike. The Monday raids at least in part were carried out by Ukrainian Tupolev Tu-141s—jet-propelled reconnaissance drones that last flew for the Soviet air force in the 1970s and ’80s. The Ukrainian air force apparently swapped out the drones’ cameras for explosives and programmed their inertial navigation systems to fly them into the ground at Dyagilevo and Engels.

It’s unclear how many Tu-141s and similar Tu-143s the Ukrainian air force has left. But there’s no technical reason Kyiv couldn’t aim them at Moscow. The drones can range as far as 620 miles.

And it’s not safe to assume Russian air-defenses easily would shoot down the drones. Repeated Ukrainian raids—including a startling deep strike on an oil depot in the Russian city of Belgorod by Ukrainian attack helicopters in April—have proved both the inadequacy of Russian air-defenses and the ability of Ukrainian planners to find ways through these defenses.

No, the main reason that the Ukrainians might not strike Moscow is that raids on population centers can endanger civilians. In fact, when it comes to Russian raids on Ukrainian cities, killing, hurting, displacing and terrifying civilians is the whole point.

Russia aims to terrorize the Ukrainian population in order to erode support for the war effort. But history time and again has proved that city blitzes usually increase civilian resistance rather than reduce it.

That idea has endured in Ukraine. “There’s absolutely no evidence that the attacks on civil society have made a difference to popular support,” Lawrence Freedman, an emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London, told Salon. “If anything, the Russian attacks have encouraged popular support for the war.”

Before raiding Moscow, Ukrainian leaders first would have to buy into the same wrong proposition—that attacking the city and killing civilians would hasten the war’s end.