Vladimir Putin has spent four years trying, with varying degrees of success, to keep the consequences of his invasion of Ukraine away from normal Russians. But increasingly, his war is coming home.
Ukraine has ramped up its campaign of long-range strikes inside Russia, launching three times as many in July as it did in January. With Russians due to vote in parliamentary elections in just over a month, Kyiv is intensifying its attacks just as Putin most needs to demonstrate political grip.
While he can pretty much decide election results, he can’t control what happens between now and polling day. And even if Ukraine’s campaign of strikes won’t force a change in geopolitical course, they further erode the self-promoted but brittle veneer of domestic stability in the eyes of many Russians.
Shorts
Deep strikes by Ukraine are growing in scale and complexity. In the last week alone, It hit two grain export facilities and a naval base on the Black Sea, oil refineries in western Russia, and petrochemical and other facilities in Siberia more than 1,500 miles east of Moscow. It has said that domestically produced weapons with greater payloads are on the way.
