00:00Last week, a barrage of Russian missiles and drones struck a children's hospital, a
00:06schools, residential buildings and warehouses in the vicinity of kyiv, killing at least
00:12to 16 people.
00:13Ukraine, lacking Patriot interceptors, failed to shoot down any of the missiles
00:19Russian ballistic missiles.
00:21Ukraine's response this week included a drone strike that caused a huge
00:26fire at one of Russia's largest oil refineries.
00:30Near Mishni Novgorod.
00:31Meanwhile, a warehouse belonging to the e-commerce giant Wildberries
00:36It was reduced to ashes in the Tambov region.
00:40According to The Wall Street Journal, the air war between Russia and Ukraine has entered a new phase
00:46phase.
00:47With expanded air resources and insufficient air defenses, both sides are hitting each other.
00:53in a brutal and relentless confrontation that causes ever-increasing destruction
00:59and a growing number of civilian casualties, journalists report.
01:03Ukrainians have managed to protect, repair, or replace enough heating systems
01:09and energy to keep cities running.
01:13But with each passing year, the cumulative damage to Ukraine's power grid has been increasing.
01:19The shortage of Patriot interceptors, scarce worldwide since the war between the United States
01:24United States and Iran are sowing discord in kyiv.
01:28This summer's long-range Russian attacks killed hundreds of Ukrainian civilians,
01:34with the Iskander-M ballistic missiles causing a significant number of deaths.
01:40Many Kyiv residents fear that Russia will try to destroy the water and sewage systems.
01:45of the city, in an attempt by Moscow to create a humanitarian crisis.
01:49Some in Kyiv are debating whether to temporarily move to the countryside if conditions in the capital worsen.
01:56They're coming back too harsh this winter.
01:58Few believe that Russia will achieve victory this way, according to media reports.
02:04The theory is that pain and exhaustion lead to political capitulation, he stated
02:10Franz Stefan Gady, Vienna-based military analyst and director of Gady Consulting.
02:15However, the experience since 2022, and before that, a century of strategic bombing,
02:24suggests that sustained air strikes strengthen societies, rather than break them,
02:29And nothing in the Ukrainian data indicates otherwise, he added.
02:34In particular, polls show that Ukrainian public opinion has become more
02:40opposed to territorial concessions to Moscow in recent months.
02:44Ukraine's long-range capabilities have expanded dramatically during the
02:50last year.
02:51Their campaign of deep attacks has extended from oil refineries to infrastructure
02:57from energy exports and missile component factories to transportation
03:02maritime in the Black Sea and the warehouses of the largest e-commerce chains
03:07from Russia, Wildberries and Oson.
03:11Kyiv's stated objectives are to disrupt military supply chains, cut off the
03:16export revenues that finance Moscow's war machine and provoke a
03:21widespread economic disruption that makes the war visible to the Russian population.
03:27However, most observers of Russia doubt that the discontent among the
03:32The population or the country's business elite will push Putin to accept a ceasefire.
03:38He's betting that he can suppress dissent and that the economy can withstand the pain.
03:44for longer than Ukraine can withstand.
03:48The consequences of a far-reaching attack campaign for society and the economy
03:53Russian conditions would have to worsen significantly for the calculations to even come close to changing.
03:59"Putin," said Hanna Notte, a Russia expert at the James Martin Center for Russian Studies.
04:05of non-proliferation.
04:06Although several Russian analysts have recently stated that Moscow is failing
04:11In achieving their military objectives in Ukraine, they were less concerned about the impact of
04:17the campaign of long-range attacks and more concerned about the lack of progress in
04:22"The front," Notte pointed out.
04:23The decisive variable in the war remains military manpower, Gadi added, including
04:30whether Putin will launch a large-scale mobilization in the coming months to double
04:35his land campaign.
04:37Long-range attacks are what both sides do because it's the only area in the
04:42that can still operate when the ground war has reached a stalemate, he concluded.
04:47It will become increasingly destructive, without ever becoming decisive.
04:56Thank you!
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