Russia's Strategy Behind Massive Ukraine Strikes

All right, Alexander, let's talk about what is happening in Ukraine and with Russia and the recent very large-scale missile and drone strikes into Ukraine, focusing on Kyiv, but also targeting Sumy. Sumy got hit particularly hard yesterday, but the latest reports that I've claimed anywhere between 50 to 70 missiles were launched into Ukraine, focusing on Kyiv mostly. And some reports claim, well, the Russian Ministry of Defense actually claims that these strikes were done in retaliation for the drone strikes into Russia from the Ukraine military. What are your thoughts? Were these planned strikes or were they done in retaliation? I have no doubt that they are planned strikes and that they're part of a strategy that has been developed for quite a long time. The Russians always say that these are retaliatory strikes because, according to the provisions of the special military operation, they are supposed to attack only military and military industrial facilities. By saying that these are retaliatory strikes, it gives them legally, I'm talking about internal Russian law, legally a bit more flexibility. So it works to their advantage to say that these are retaliatory strikes. But if you look at the kind of targets that they carry out, if you look at the scale and complexity of these strikes, there is no doubt at all to my mind that these are carefully prepared, weeks in advance, as part of a military campaign, a campaign of strikes against Ukraine, which we're starting to see build up and which will continue to build up over the course of the summer. We had a very big strike, if you remember, early in June after the Starobelsk attack. I made the same point then. The Russians said that was a retaliatory strike. But in fact, I've no doubt that it was the first of several, a sequence of strikes. There's now been the next big one. We're going to see more and more big ones like this happen. And the Russians have been stockpiling drones. They've been modernising their Gerand drones. There's some reason to think, I think, that they're equivalent to Starlink, the Rassvet system, may be operating at least at some level. Putin has hinted at this. And I think over the course of the summer and autumn, we're going to see these strikes ramp up, even as the Russian ground offensive continues. One thing I would say, well, there's two things I would say about the strike. Again, air defences, Ukrainian air defences, not really functioning very effectively anymore. Ukraine, very short of Patriot missile systems, as it admits itself. It claims always that it's shot down many missiles. The realities, the pictures, the information we get from the ground tell us a very different story. Secondly, no use by the Russians over the course of this strike of the Oreshnik. There's been much speculation about when the Russians are going to start using the Oreshnik in a big way. Putin has said, again, that it is being developed and perfected to conduct strikes within urban areas, implying that it's going to be used against bunkers in Kiev and Kharkov and other places. But it wasn't used in the strike that's just taken place. The fact that Sumy was hit so heavily is, of course, fully consistent with this strike being coordinated with Russian movements on the ground. You say they're building up to something. What is that something? What are they building up towards? Because they've been building up for about three months now, and it seems that over the past month or two, they've launched less drones into Ukraine and less missile strikes into Ukraine, while Ukraine has definitely increased almost on a daily basis the drone strikes into Russia. So what do you think the Russian military is up to? I'm going to actually go beyond that. I don't think they've been building up over the last few months. I think that what we're seeing is a developing pattern of Russian drone and missile strikes going back all the way to October 2022. These strikes are getting larger in scale and more sophisticated all the time. The Russians began their missile offensive back in October 2022, their first big missile strikes. It's clear, I think increasingly, that they were themselves learning how to conduct missile strikes and understanding better the nature of the Ukrainian air defences. So it's very typical of the Russians, this slow, big build up with more and more types of weapons, more and more types of missiles, ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, hypersonic missiles, different types of hypersonic missiles, more sophisticated drones, electro-optical drones, all of those things, until eventually, probably within the next few months, as all of these weapons systems become perfected, and as the ability to coordinate and operate these strikes becomes perfected, and as Ukrainian air defences are further ground down, then you will get the strikes which will be mostly carried out in order to facilitate the ground offensive that the Russians are doing. So these are not strikes that are just being done in order to cause damage in Kiev or to create lots of noise and pictures and things of this kind. It's basically part of an approach to enable the Russian military to advance in particular places, to disrupt Ukrainian communications, Ukrainian logistics, Ukrainian ability to resist these Russian advances on the battlefields. And I think there's a few things I'll just quickly say. I mean, one of the other things that we are starting to see increasingly is that the Russian Air Force bombers are now much more active over Ukrainian cities. They are less concerned, it seems, about Ukrainian air defences. So the Russians tried to carry out airstrikes with bombers against Ukrainian cities in 2022. Several of their Sukhoi-34s were shot down. They then stopped doing that. Now, increasingly, they are doing it again. They're using these FAB bombs, which are being used apparently in quantities that are greater than we've seen at any time in the war. And they're being used against cities. They're being used against Zaporozhye, against Kharkov, against Kiev itself, against Sumy, against all sorts of places. So we're starting to see an air campaign evolve, which is closer to the kind of air campaign that the Americans do when they carry out offensives. In other words, an air campaign attacking Ukrainian logistics, Ukrainian command centres, all intended to assist the Russian army to continue its advance. Now, what have the Russians been doing over the last couple of weeks? It's, again, quite interesting, because they haven't conducted big missile strikes, and they haven't struck at Kiev. They have been attacking what you could call Ukrainian supply lines. They've been hunting locomotives along the railway system. And they have also been attacking gas filling stations along the big arterial highways that the Ukrainians use to send supplies to some of their cities, to Kharkov, to Sumy, to the Donbass, to those sorts of places. And the idea is, the plan appears to be, destroy the gas filling stations. That means the trucks moving along these highways can't refill with diesel. And the result is that that gradually chokes off logistics to those cities. I think this is a very, very early stage of that campaign. It's not spectacular. Perhaps we'll see it build up. We'll see what happens. Why was this not done earlier, like in the conflict? I'll tell you why. I think that the problem with it was that the Russians didn't have the weapons to do this. They needed many more drones, because most of these attacks on the gas filling stations are being done with drones, Gerand drones. So they needed many, many more drones to do this. Perhaps now they're starting to get those. And they probably also needed to refine and develop the drones as well. So I said that there's some evidence that the Russian equivalent of the Staling system is being used. It looks as if some of the Gerand drones now have optical guidance. In other words, they're controlled by ground controllers in Russia. And it looks as if some of these optically guided drones have been used to attack gas filling stations. Previously, drones launched by the Russians basically went on fixed trajectories. Gas filling stations are relatively small facilities. You needed perhaps a little bit more precision with the drones and maybe the optical guidance provided. What is Ukraine doing on their side? They're launching missiles. They claim the Flamingo missiles. It seems as if Russia is knocking down those missiles for the most part. But a couple of them did get through and hit an artillery facility in Volgograd a couple of days ago. The Titan facility. A huge facility, by the way. And a very historic one. And very, very important part of the Russian military industrial complex. And now again, these strikes will have caused a certain degree of disruption with the missiles. They won't have stopped production entirely. And undoubtedly, the factor in question will be back in production fairly quickly. But what usually happens with missile strikes, Ukrainian missile strikes, with any type of missile, is that there's a period of a few weeks that the Ukrainians launch the missiles. The Russians then find out more about how the missiles work, what their flight profile is. The air defence system then adapts itself to shooting them down. And the effectiveness of the missiles declines. And certainly, I think that's going to be true with the Flamingo system. In fact, I think it largely is already true with the Flamingo system. It was previously true with the Storm Shadow and the ATAKMS missiles that the United States supplied to Ukraine back in 2024. And I think the weapon, the missile that the Russians probably are most concerned about is neither of these, you know, the Flamingo or the Storm Shadow anymore. There's some reports that the Americans have provided a smaller, lighter cruise missile called the Dirty Dagger. And that is a completely new system. And I suspect the Russian air defence system is going to have to adapt over the next couple of weeks to countering that missile, if it is indeed being used at all, as some people on the Russian side are suggesting. Anyway, we'll have to get more information about this. The Ukrainians have conducted very big drone attacks on Russia also, you know, pre-2014 Russia, over the last few days, about the last week. So far, the Russian air defence system seems to be quite successful in shooting down most of the drones. I mean, attempts to reach Moscow have been mostly unsuccessful, and other big Russian cities. But we are always in a game here. The drones, the people who build the drones in Europe, in the United States, see what the Russians are doing in terms of air defence. They then adapt the drones, the Russians then catch up. This goes on all the time. For the moment, the Ukrainian drone attacks have not been very effective on pre-2014 Russia. Ukrainian drone attacks on Crimea, and Zaporozhye, and southern Donetsk region, have been more effective, because the distance the drones have to cover is much shorter, and the drones come with bigger warheads. But even there, I'm sort of getting the sense that it's not quite as intense as it was maybe 10 days ago. But that's just my own impression. Well, I mean, Russia, the Kremlin, has admitted that these drones are causing a problem, and they are having to import oil. Well, that is an interesting question, because... They're hitting the refineries. So Russia continues to export, and then the oil that they export gets refined in India, for example. But as far as refining domestically, for the domestic market, they seem to have problems. Right. Well, can I just explain that, because this is in fact a long-standing thing. Russia has refineries that produce diesel oil, and diesel oil is never in short supply in Russia. Russia produces about twice as much diesel oil as it needs, and there is no shortage of it. With gasoline, Russia actually has far fewer refineries that produce gasoline, and usually in the summer months, there are typically always shortages of gasoline in Russia. And Russia tends to import gasoline from various places, from Kazakhstan, from Belarus, and even India, and to some extent India too. And this is a product of the Soviet era, because most of the gasoline refineries were located in other places, in Belarus, for example, in Kazakhstan, not in Russia itself. So it is not unusual for the Russians to import gasoline. It's a little bit like the United States, which also imports oil, heavier oil, in order to produce aviation fuel and gasoline from its own refineries, even though the United States produces oil as well. So this is not quite as new, or as dramatic, as people say. Now, the Russian deputy prime minister and head of the energy complex said that Russia might import some gasoline, more gasoline than usual, to stabilise the market. And this has been linked to the problems that we've seen over the last weeks. The Russian authorities say that this is partly because of the attacks on the refineries, but mostly because of panic buying of gasoline, which has taken place in a few locations. The interesting thing is that one of the countries that one would expect to say, we are increasing exports of gasoline to Russia, in order to make up for these problems, is Kazakhstan. And they've just come out and said that they've actually received no orders or requests from Russia for increased gasoline imports. So I wonder whether this is, again, something that the Russians are saying, again, in order to calm the situation on the internal gasoline market. Suffice to say, the Russian economy mostly works on diesel, and there is no shortage of it. Okay. The parliament in Ukraine approves the pantheon of heroes. A slap in the face from Malensky to Poland, a slap in the face to Russia, to Israel, to the world, really. Europe doesn't seem too bothered with it. Europe isn't bothered by it. Britain hasn't bothered. I haven't seen a single discussion of it in the media here in London. The United States didn't seem to worry. The countries that I mentioned have officially issued condemnations of this, actually. That's why I mentioned that. I mean, officially, they have posted condemnations of Malensky's glorification of these individuals like Bandera and Melnick and these guys, but they're going to create a mausoleum, Alexander. Your thoughts? Well, he doesn't care. He doesn't care if he gets complaints from Israel and Poland, because he knows perfectly well that the countries that really matter for him, the United States, Germany, Britain, France, they're just going to go on giving him money and supplying him with weapons, because that is what they do. They will look the other way, and they will pretend that this isn't happening. Remember, was it a year ago, two years ago, that we had a person turn up in the Canadian parliament, and he served in the German military? Exactly. And there was an brief outcry about it in Canada, and nobody cared. In the end, nothing changed. Canada continued its policy. So, Zelensky has completely committed himself to this, and it makes political sense for him to do this, because it shores up his support with the people that ultimately, I think, he feels he needs to rely upon within Ukraine itself, which is, of course, the ultranationalists and the ultranationalist brigades, which ultimately are his guarantee of retaining power. So, as I said, it makes total sense for him. The fact that the Poles don't like it, or at least some Poles don't like it. Navrotsky, the president, doesn't like it. Kaczynski, the previous prime minister, doesn't like it. Tusk doesn't seem to be especially bothered. He pretends that he is, but he only says that because he has to, because many people in Poland are very upset about it. But Zelensky doesn't care. In fact, the fact that he gets all this criticism from Poland and Israel and, of course, Russia, he could argue, well, he probably thinks it's better for him, better that he seems to be standing up for these people and for the memory of these people within Ukraine. And the criticism of it simply confirms that the ultranationalist constituency that he wants to win over, that he is with them, that he's for them, that he's their champion. What's happening with Belarus? Well, this is an interesting... He walked it back with some dumb excuse, Zelensky, chickened out. He walked it back with some dumb excuse that his intel is telling him that Belarus is dismantling the repeaters and the radars and stuff like that. And then Kaczynski comes out a day later and says, no, Belarus is not dismantling anything. I mean, he made Zelensky look like a complete clown. Well, indeed. And here, perhaps, that's the more interesting story. First of all, let's talk about Belarus. Lukashenko had a two-day meeting, a meeting that lasted for two days with Putin. We're not being told very much about it, but presumably they discussed military cooperation in light of the threats that have been coming from Zelensky. And I mean, you can't completely ignore the threats coming from Zelensky. We've seen that he's prepared to conduct attacks in various places. The Belarusian army is quite small. If Ukraine were to attack Belarus, it would need help from Russia. So probably they talked all about that. Lukashenko, by the way, then went on to China, where he's met Xi Jinping, and he's had further discussions with China. And it looks as if he's going to get some economic investment, some economic help from China as well. So there's all that going on. But perhaps the more interesting story for me is that Sierski is going off-message. Firstly, he said there's no actual immediate threat from Belarus, completely contradicting what Zelensky said, because Zelensky was at one time talking about Belarus joining the war, conducting attacks on Kiev. Sierski says that isn't true. He then says that the repeaters in Belarus, contradicting Zelensky completely, are still functioning. As you said, making Zelensky look like a fool. Then he says the situation isn't really good at all on the front lines. We're desperately short of men. The situation is very bad. And now he's saying there's a real possibility that the Russians are going to march from Bryansk and might be threatening Kiev again. Not things, I suspect, that Zelensky wants to hear. And the question is why. At one level, the military situation on the front lines is not going well for Ukraine. I mean, they're losing Slovyansk. Well, I think they've lost, sorry, Konstantinovka, they've lost Liman, or close to doing so. There's Russian advances on Zaporozhye, all sorts of places. But I suspect that one of the other things is that Sierski has seen reports that Zelensky told Richard Blumenthal, the US senator, a few weeks ago, about two weeks ago, that he's going to sack Sierski very soon, and he's going to make Budanov commander of Ukraine's military. And I think Sierski is obviously unhappy with that. He's been very loyal to Zelensky up to now, and now, as I said, he's hitting back at Zelensky in whatever way he can. Okay, we will end the video there. The Durand.locals.com. We're on X, we're on Rumble, we're on Telegram. Go to Durand's shop, pick up some merch, and also check us out on Substack as well. All those links are in the description box down below. Take care.