During a meeting with Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal in Tallinn on April 3, Estonian President Alar Karis reaffirmed support for Ukraine's attacks on military targets in Russia, stating that it was "perfectly legitimate for the Ukrainian forces to destroy infrastructure critical to the Russian army."
It’s legitimate in that it doesn’t violate the laws of war. Russia attacked Ukraine; Ukraine can hit Russia.
But that kind of misses the point. Nobody’s saying that; it’s a different question from whether it’s necessarily a good idea.
This war will not likely be decided by Moscow taking Kyiv – I think that it’s generally-considered that Moscow has failed at that – or Kyiv taking Moscow, which was never Kyiv’s intent. What’s going to happen is that at some point, one side will have to decide that the benefits of continuing to fight no longer outweigh the drawbacks.
If it’s Russia – and Ukraine would rather that it be Russia – then it’ll be either the leadership, or the public.
My guess is that from a leadership standpoint, from the viewpoint of the Kremlin, it doesn’t much matter whether Ukraine hits targets in Russia or in Ukraine.
But I’d guess that from the standpoint of the Russian public, it might matter a fair bit.
One thing that Russian leadership has done is to present the war as defending against an threat to Russia. That is, the story the Kremlin wants to tell is that Russia was facing an immediate threat and needed to fight back against it. They presented the recent terrorist attack on the theater in Moscow, rather implausibly, as being the work of Ukraine.
Then there was that attack by two small drones on the Kremlin about a year ago:
Ukraine said that it wasn’t them. Russia said that it was.
This “Russia is under attack by Ukraine” is a difficult story to convincingly tell when the fighting is in Ukraine.
It’s probably a good bet that what the Kremlin is worried about public support for the war running out. It’d rather have a situation where Ukraine is attacking Russia.
And if that’s the narrative that Russia wants, it’s probably a safe bet that that narrative is not in Ukraine’s interests.
Now, hitting targets in Russia does have some useful effects for Ukraine. Military hardware may be more vulnerable than in Ukraine, and Russia doesn’t get to pick what’s exposed to conflict. Military production can be hit. It’s possible to wage economic war on Russia, try to put pressures on the Russian civilian population. It probably isn’t well-defended, at least not all of it.
So, the question here is to what matters more. Is the benefit to Ukraine in terms of freedom of target selection greater than the benefit in terms of popular support for the war among the Russian public?
My guess is that the US – which has been quite unenthusiastic about providing resources to attack targets in Russia – has looked at the war. A point I’ve heard made from folks in the US defense world is that in this conflict, Russia is a lot closer to the US’s typical role than Ukraine – that is, we’re not likely to need to fight a conflict on home soil.
My guess is that people in the US have looked at the conflict and basically said “Okay. If Russia is more like US, how have we lost conflicts in the past? What has been problematic for us, and how can we induce the same situation in Russia?”
The two wars that I think it’s safe to say were the War of 1812 and the Vietnam War; in both wars, the US’s strategic goals that the US entered the war with were not achieved. Both wars were quite unpopular with the public. Both were seen as offensive rather than defensive, and in having questionable justification for that offensive. In neither case – and particularly Vietnam – did the US lose because the other side demonstrated itself able to create widespread destruction in the US but rather because public support to continue the war evaporated.
So my guess is that the US’s theory of victory here is “Russian public doesn’t see the war as being justified, and people opposed to the war get louder over time”.
There are a number of people in the West paying a lot of attention to what the Russian public thinks and why.
While polling data in an authoritarian society such as Putin’s Russia must be treated with caution, recent trends identified by Levada and Russian Field are confirmed by a source close to the Kremlin. Valery Fedorov is director of Kremlin-loyal pollster WCIOM and an official advisor to the first deputy chairman of Russia’s presidential administration. In a September 2023 interview with Russia’s RBC, Fedorov reluctantly acknowledged that the number of Russians who actively and enthusiastically support Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine is not more than 10-15 percent of the population. “The majority of Russians do not want to seize Kyiv or Odesa,” he commented. ‘If it was up to them whether to the start the “special military operation,” they probably would not have done it.”
Recent WCIOM research also acknowledges a sharp decline in both viewership and audience trust toward Russia’s state propaganda television channels. In 2023, just 40 percent of Russians cited state TV as their main source of information, down from 53 percent five years earlier. Since 2016, trust in Russian state channels as “objective” sources of information has almost halved, plunging from 46 percent to 26 percent.
Now, that’s not the only way one might look at this. Another might be that the Russian government might make some calculations, decide that the ongoing cost of the war relative to any potential returns from continuing the war is very high, and that they don’t want to continue the war. Or maybe the Russian public decides that the reduction in standard-of-living that the war imposes on them is high and decides that they’ve had it. If those are the dominant factors, then maybe destroying Russian fossil fuel infrastructure makes sense.
In the past, the US has conducted major strategic bombing campaigns. What Russia – much less Ukraine – is capable of doing in the other’s territory, given air defense and bombing capabilities, is far, far smaller. The US has generally not found these to be incredibly successful in terms of impact on public support:
The bombing campaign destroyed almost every substantial building in North Korea.[20][21] The war’s highest-ranking U.S. POW, U.S. Major General William F. Dean,[22] reported that the majority of North Korean cities and villages he saw were either rubble or snow-covered wasteland.[23][24] Dean Rusk, the U.S. State Department official who headed East Asian affairs, concluded that America had bombed “everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another.”[25] North Korean factories, schools, hospitals, and government offices were forced to move underground.[2] In November 1950, the North Korean leadership instructed the population to build dugouts and mud huts and to dig tunnels, in order to solve the acute housing problem.[26]
Pyongyang, which saw 75% of its area destroyed, was so devastated that bombing was halted as there were no longer any worthy targets.[29][30] By the end of the campaign, US bombers had difficulty in finding targets and were reduced to bombing footbridges or jettisoning their bombs into the sea.[31]
Russia isn’t – not with conventional weapons, at any rate – going to be able to do anything even remotely approaching this to Ukraine. And Ukraine isn’t going to be able to do so to Russia. And that wasn’t enough to get the North Korean public to give up.
And we’ve done Germany, and Japan – where Japan did ultimately surrender, but that required numerous other supporting factors including the navy and air force mostly being destroyed, the civilian population starving, the merchant fleet destroyed, an enormous invasion fleet having made it to Japan, the Soviet Union declaring war and that still went to atomic weapons before the war ended. Vietnam, where the bombing was larger than in either.
My guess is that both Washington and Kyiv place some weight on both of those routes, call them the “Ukraine isn’t a foreign threat to Russia that we must defend against” and the “increasing costs of the war to Russia” route…but that Washington places more weight on the first, and Kyiv the second.
Now, okay. I don’t know what the right answer is here. There are probably people who have a really big stake in getting this right and a lot of expertise in answering precisely these sorts of questions who have spent a lot of time and legitimately want to get the right answer and have come up with different answers. But saying that I do think that there’s a argument for not wanting to have the war in Russia. It may or may not be right but it isn’t crazy.
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