On December 26, Ukraine used drones to go deep into the Russian border and launched an attack on the Engels Air Force Base, which is about 700 kilometers away from the Russian-Ukrainian border. This is the second time this month.
According to the Russian side, all Ukrainian drones were shot down, and the Russian military aircraft on the base were not damaged, but the debris of the drones killed three people.
The social media of both Russia and Ukraine reported that the military aircraft was damaged and that the Russian military aircraft was withdrawn from the air force base, but these reports are difficult to be confirmed.
In any case, this attack is obviously another provocation from Ukraine to Russia's bottom line, reflecting Ukraine's determination to fight Russia to the end for a long time.
At the same time, this kind of attack can happen again in the same military important place within three weeks, which also highlights that Russia's air defense does have loopholes that can be exploited by Ukraine.
The Siges air base under attack this time is the base of some Russian strategic bombers Tu-95 and Tu-160.
These military aircraft have recently been frequently used in missile attacks on Ukraine's energy infrastructure and are also an important part of Russia's "nuclear triad".
At least one Tu-95 was damaged during the last such attack on December 5.
After the last attack, satellite pictures show that Russia has made some preparations for a potential similar attack on Ukraine. It parked its military aircraft scattered at some air force bases, or built a separation wall between military aircraft and military aircraft to avoid any possible attacks. Spill damage.
However, these preventive preparations do not seem to be carried out at the same time as the improvement of the air defense system. Today, Ukraine still uses drones to penetrate hundreds of kilometers into the country and reach Russian military sites.
According to the analysis of all parties, whether it is the attack on December 5 or the attack on December 26, Ukraine's weapons should be attack drones converted from Soviet-made unmanned reconnaissance drones in the 1970s.
This fact, of course, also makes people question Russia's air defense capabilities even more.
Sporadic attacks are intended to attack the heart
However, judging from Ukraine’s recent series of attacks on Russian territory and even Crimea, what Ukraine wants to achieve is not a battlefield goal that can turn the situation around, but a kind of psychological warfare, just like Ukraine’s attack on Crimea in October So-so attack on the bridge - a symbol of Russian President Vladimir Putin commemorating his conquest of Crimea like Catherine the Great.
Whether it is the attack on Russian air and naval bases in Crimea since August, or the drone strikes that have penetrated hundreds of miles into Russia this year, these actions rely on simple battlefield adventures without reliable Weapon support generally only uses crude weapons made by the Ukrainian army's "indigenous modification".
This determines that the destructive power of this type of attack is limited and cannot be sustained.
Although the impact of launching such an attack on the battlefield situation is extremely limited, its symbolism can hit the enemy's psychology.
For example, after Ukraine launched sporadic attacks on Crimea this summer, in the minds of many Russian residents in Crimea, the status of Crimea as a Russian territory is in doubt, and its security is no longer guaranteed. , leading to a certain scale of exodus in Crimea.
Moreover, it had been rumored for several months that Russia would launch a "referendum on joining Russia" to take the newly occupied Russian-controlled Ukrainian land into the country. Ukraine's attack on Crimea was to show that "joining Russia" itself could not suppress Ukraine will not be afraid to attack Russian "territory" without stopping Ukraine's will to regain its homeland.
In fact, after Putin really pushed the four Ukrainian states to invest in Russia in September, this kind of action, which was originally intended to deter Ukraine from attacking, became a purely symbolic symbol and had no effect on the battlefield situation.
Such actions are also a test of Putin's bottom line.
Putin himself has been hinting at the possibility of using nuclear weapons since the beginning of the war. However, Ukraine has launched attacks on Crimea and even undisputed Russian territory in recent months. Putin has never dared to escalate the war to the level of nuclear weapons. .
After the attack on the Crimea Bridge, Putin's escalation was only a concentrated attack on Ukraine's energy infrastructure.
This of course caused major damage, but it failed to shake the anti-Russian hearts of the Ukrainian people.
The strategy of attacking people’s livelihood infrastructure has always been the idea of escalating the war of Russia’s right-wing opinion leaders. Now that the war has been raised to this point, it has not been effective. What Ukraine wants to bet is that Putin has escalated the war to the limit he can accept. It is still within the acceptable range of Ukraine.
On December 1, in Kyiv, Ukraine, workers inspected a new gasoline generator, ready to be installed in a bank branch.
(Associated Press)
Psychological Warfare for US Military Aid
In the war situation that both sides are accepting or accepting, if Ukraine wants to reverse the situation on the battlefield, the upgraded military assistance of the United States is a necessary prerequisite.
There have been precedents for this situation: after the U.S. HIMARS was widely used in the Ukrainian battlefield in July, the Ukrainian army not only blocked the Russian offensive in the Donbas, but also recaptured a large area of Kharkiv. Land and the only Russian-controlled city west of the Dnieper (Dnieper) River, Kherson (Kherson), and maintain multi-way slow-moving to Russia.
The problem is that the Biden administration in the United States has been worried that the war will escalate to the point where NATO and Russia exchange fire, leading to the so-called "World War III." The U.S. made the decision to upgrade military aid only after the obvious need. From the Hippocampus to deal with Russian cannons, to the Patriot air defense system recently used to deal with Russian missile attacks, its decision-making has always been hesitant.
This kind of hesitation is the result of Putin's psychological warfare against the United States: he took advantage of the Biden administration's fear of Russia's unlimited escalation of war to prevent the United States from fully supporting Ukraine at the level of armaments.
On December 21, in Washington, USA, Zelensky and Biden held talks in the Oval Office of the White House.
Zelensky said that being able to visit abroad this time proved that he relied on US assistance to keep the situation under control.
(Reuters)
Ukraine is now continuously launching such sporadic attacks that gradually penetrate into the Russian border, precisely to break the Biden administration's concerns about the escalation of the war being out of control.
When Ukraine provokes Putin again and again, but Putin refuses to escalate again and again, people can probably only draw one conclusion, that Putin's nuclear threat is just a "paper tiger."
The result of this victory in psychological warfare will be more aggressive military assistance from the West, and this is the basis for Ukraine's victory.
Just as Ukraine launched its latest attack on this psychological warfare, the foreign ministers of Ukraine and Russia both talked about the possibility of a truce. Ukraine proposed that the United Nations host a peace summit in February next year, but Russia must first accept war crimes prosecution, while Russia It is proposed that as long as Ukraine "de-militarizes and de-Nazifies" and removes security threats including "Russia's new territories", peace talks can be initiated.
This kind of peace talks is obviously unacceptable to both parties.
In other words, this is just a declaration of war in the name of "peace talks".
Assuming Russia has no intention or ability to escalate, the only thing that can break the stalemate in the war is the full arms assistance of the United States to Ukraine.
For Ukraine, the psychological warfare of turning Putin into a "paper tiger" may not be less important than the advance and retreat of the two armies on the battlefield.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Raises Conditions to Hold a Peace Summit in February, Russia Responds to Ukraine's Call to Expel Russia From the United Nations After Zelensky's Visit to the United States