[NEWS] Blasts deep inside Russia hand Putin a fresh problem, with no obvious answer

[ORIGINje]

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Moscow’s accusation that Ukrainian drones struck two airbases deep inside Russia has once again raised the febrile question of escalation nine months into the war.

The strikes are an extraordinary breach of Russia’s assumptions that it can protect its deep interior, from which safe harbors its strategic bombers have caused carnage across Ukraine with relative impunity.

These are airbases very far inside Russia, and whatever the truth of the strikes – whether they represent a new long-distance drone capability Ukraine has advertised, or there’s another explanation – this is just not something that was meant to happen when Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his “10-day invasion” in February. Week by week, there are yet more signs that Moscow’s military machine cannot do what it says on its 

 — 
Moscow’s accusation that Ukrainian drones struck two airbases deep inside Russia has once again raised the febrile question of escalation nine months into the war.

The strikes are an extraordinary breach of Russia’s assumptions that it can protect its deep interior, from which safe harbors its strategic bombers have caused carnage across Ukraine with relative impunity.

These are airbases very far inside Russia, and whatever the truth of the strikes – whether they represent a new long-distance drone capability Ukraine has advertised, or there’s another explanation – this is just not something that was meant to happen when Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his “10-day invasion” in February. Week by week, there are yet more signs that Moscow’s military machine cannot do what it says on its 

Russian state news agencies heaped discomfort onto humiliation by adding Monday that the initial two airfields in question had in fact been photographed by a US-based commercial satellite imaging company over the weekend.

The low-tech tools employed in this embarrassment pop the balloon of Russia’s peer status to NATO.

Russian humiliation is usually accompanied with concerns it may escalate the conflict. But it is hard to know what else Russia could do to Ukraine that it has not already done. It has leveled cities, hit civilian infrastructure callously and relentlessly when it can, killed thousands of civilians and yet more troops, and bombed maternity hospitals and shelters marked with the word “Children.”

At some point, the labored assumption that Russia has magic, non-apocalyptic buttons left to press will begin to fade. Let us first quickly discuss why a Russian nuclear strike seems off the table, at least for now. After months of deeply chilling nuclear rhetoric – spanning potential “accidents” at nuclear power stations, to evidence-free talk of Ukraine using a dirty bomb, to open threats invoking Moscow’s nuclear arsenal – Moscow seems to have eased off on the Armageddon rhetoric.

China has been very clear it feels such talk must stop. So has India. At the end of last month, Putin found himself in an extraordinary moment, signing a decree with the president of Kazakhstan reiterating that nuclear war can never be won and should never be fought. It was a reinforcement of a 2006 statement between Moscow and the Central Asian states it back then sought to lead as a geopolitical power. How times have changed: Moscow is no longer looking outwards to the West as it began to 16 years ago. And Kazakhstan, who as recently as January depended on Moscow to put down internal unrest, is looking to China and Europe for its future, and seemingly nudging Putin to pledge again that nukes are bad.

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/12/06/europe/russia-ukraine-strikes-analysis-intl/index.html