Ukraine’s drone attacks drive home ‘new normal’ of war in Russia

Ukraine launched a flurry of drone attacks around Russia, according to Russian authorities, including a drone barrage near Moscow that disrupted flights at some airports near the capital.

“This is one of the largest attempts to attack Moscow using drones ever,” Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin wrote Wednesday on social media. “The layered defense of Moscow that was created made it possible to successfully repel all the attacks.”

Russian aviation authorities also “halted receipt and departures of aircraft” temporarily in Murmansk, a northern Russian region almost 1,100 miles from the Ukrainian border, in response to another drone attack alert. As Russian authorities claimed to be intercepting dozens of drones around the country, the Ukrainian forces seizing Russian territory in Kursk oblast crowed about their continued success in targeting Russian logistical links.

“Where do Russian pontoons disappear in Kursk Oblast?” the Ukrainian military said in a Wednesday statement. “Operatives from the Special Operations Forces, together with units of Ukraine’s defense forces, are effectively crushing them.”

That boast accompanied a video that appeared to show Ukrainian forces “identifying targets and directing HIMARS systems fire on bridges and pontoon crossings,” an overt display of the use of Western weapons inside Russia. 

“We see and know everything. Our precision bombs will get you anywhere,” Ukrainian Air Force Lt. Gen. Mykola Oleshchuk said in a separate statement with additional purported footage from Kursk. “I am grateful for the Air Force’s tactical aviation pilots for their effective strikes against clusters of enemy personnel and equipment, as well as their positions.”

Ukraine’s audacious incursion into Russian territory shocked Russian President Vladimir Putin’s team and observers in capitals around the world in early August. Russian officials claimed initially to have stymied the Ukrainian advance, but they have shifted to signaling that Russian society needs to adapt to a “new normal” in which Ukrainian forces could hold their new positions for months.

“During a shock — and this was certainly a shock — there are always leaps [in the polls]. Then people get used to it and everything settles down,” an unnamed source “close to the Putin administration” told Meduza, an independent Russian media outlet. “What happened during the Prigozhin rebellion, the mobilization, and the start of the war?”

Russian authorities have tried to shift responsibility for the attack from Kyiv to NATO allies. “The incursion into the Kursk Region is taking place with full support from the West as it was authorized by the West,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on Wednesday.

Ukrainian officials hid their plans from Western partners to avoid facing objections from U.S. or allied officials who might have feared that Putin would give an escalatory response. 

“Just a few months ago, many people around the world, if they had heard that we were planning such an operation like the one in the Kursk region, would have said that it was impossible and that it would cross the strictest of all the red lines that Russia has,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said this week. “We are now witnessing a significant ideological shift, namely, the whole naive, illusory concept of so-called red lines regarding Russia, which dominated the assessment of the war by some partners, has crumbled these days somewhere near Sudzha.”

In the meantime, Russian officials have “decided to postpone local elections in seven districts” in Kursk.

“The commission did not specify for how long the elections would be postponed, but noted that votes will not be held in the districts of Belovsky, Bolshesoldatsky, Glushkovsky, Korenevsky, Sudzhansky, Khomutovsky and in the city of Lgov until the security of voters could be ‘fully guaranteed,’” as Novaya Gazeta reported.