Deadly strikes on Dnipro and Belgorod as Russia and Ukraine exchange overnight drone attacks — Novaya Gazeta Europe
At least six people were killed and dozens more injured as Russia and Ukraine exchanged overnight drone strikes on Thursday, regional officials in both countries have said.
In the central Ukrainian city of Dnipro, an overnight Russian drone attack caused a number of fires to break out, killing one person and injuring five more, Dnipropetrovsk Governor Serhiy Lysak said on Thursday morning.
A further five people were injured in separate strikes on the nearby cities of Nikopol and Marhanets, Lysak added.
The attacks came just hours after a Russian drone strike on a shopping centre and market in the frontline city of Dobropillya in Ukraine's eastern Donetsk region which killed three people and injured at least 27 more in what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called an example of 'horrendous, dumb Russian terror'.
'There is no military logic behind their strikes, simply an attempt to kill as many as possible' Zelensky said in his nightly address to Ukrainians on Wednesday. 'Russia is all about vile strikes like this'.
According to Ukraine's Air Force, Russia launched 64 drones at the country overnight, with the central Dnipropetrovsk region the main target. Air defences shot down 36 of the drones while a further five failed to reach their targets, the Air Force said, with a total of 23 strikes recorded at five locations.
Russia's Defence Ministry, meanwhile, said it had intercepted 126 drones launched by Ukraine overnight over 11 regions of the country, as well as annexed Crimea.
One man was killed and six more people were injured in a Ukrainian drone strike on the western city of Belgorod near the border between the two countries, Governor Vyacheslav Gladkov said, with one woman killed in a later strike on the border village of Smorodino.
Alexander Gusev, governor of the western Voronezh region, said that air defences had destroyed at least five drones launched by Ukraine overnight, with four people, including three children, injured when debris fell on an apartment block in the regional capital Voronezh.
Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin said that air defences downed three drones approaching the capital overnight, with no casualties, while flights were temporarily halted at St. Petersburg's Pulkovo Airport and at Grabtsevo Airport in the city of Kaluga, southwest of Moscow.
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To understand this, we need to answer three questions: What is Russia's strategic goal? How has war changed? And how can Russia use the new nature of the war to achieve its goal? As I wrote in a previous article, in the new world of the 'right of force', American, Russian and Chinese interests coincide. They would all like to see Europe divided and weak, incapable of making strong joint decisions. They want a Europe that is not an independent centre of power but only a set of markets in which they can trade profitably. This leads to steps that can even be seen as a certain American-Russian rapprochement. Thus, the Russian strategic goal is not to seize a part of European territory as was expected during the Cold War. It would be enough now to sow panic and chaos; create a humanitarian crisis; generate refugee flows; and collapse and overthrow governments. 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These involve activities that are not obviously (at least initially) hostile until they achieve their goals, or those that, in the opinion of the other side, do not cross the threshold of reaction. Examples include the appearance of militants in eastern Ukraine in the spring of 2014 who initially seemed unserious. Following this, recently we have seen the repeated infringement of the Polish border by missiles and drones (seemingly by accident); the inexplicable death of American soldiers in Lithuania; the recent fires involving military equipment in Germany and Belgium; a fire affecting telecommunications networks in Poland; and the dangerous use of electronic warfare in the Baltics. Finally, the fourth important feature of war is that it is taking place for the first time in the postmodern world, which affects all other dimensions. 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Russian strike Most likely, we should not expect a Russian strike as a ground operation, featuring powerful tanks and motorized columns aimed at Baltic countries or the Polish-Lithuanian Suwałki corridor. Instead of this, just imagine an attack on Poland that combines: massive missile and drone attacks on energy, infrastructure and logistics facilities (by the way, drones can be marked as Ukrainian); cyber-attacks on government and infrastructure facilities; a navigation collapse due to the large-scale use of electronic warfare; sabotage and terrorist groups creating sudden 'ecological' and man-made disasters; the destabilization of society (already heated) through social networks; the use of a 'fifth column' and 'useful idiots'; crowds of thousands of Middle Eastern refugees released across the Belarusian border. I am not saying that everything will necessarily be like this. I just want to emphasize that the war could be completely different from the one Europe is preparing for. 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