In wars, there’s a rule: if you can, you do. If you shout and threaten, it means you probably can’t, but you try to achieve results through other means: intimidation, spreading panic, disbelief, discord…
The reaction of foreign embassies to Russia’s threats to “destroy Kyiv” and advice to “evacuate” is perfectly adequate: a full-scale war has been going on for five years, and things have been worse, so everyone knows what to do. No one is going to evacuate.
But the Russians are engaging in psychological games.
They pompously announce that Putin has signed a law granting another permission to use the army abroad, this time to… free Russian citizens convicted by foreign courts.
You can imagine brave Russian paratroopers jumping out of aircraft over a sleeping European city to free hypothetical “Petrov” and “Bashirov,” caught in another terrorist act.
And the next scene: the same paratroopers, stammering something about “exercises,” “blown away by the wind,” and “got lost” (it’s probably no coincidence that the root of this word is the Slavic “mistake”).
In reality, they will be provided with legal assistance, as Russia appeals to the International Court of Justice to… “protect Russians in the Baltic countries.”
The best weapon against terror is not to be afraid. But not because one should be careless, but because one should adequately understand the seriousness of the threat. The enemy’s available means – and the means of counteraction available. The more effectively these means work, the fewer chances the terrorists have.
This is what Volodymyr Zelenskyy should discuss with faction and group leaders.
In American political rhetoric, there’s the term “paper tiger.” It looks fierce but is actually insignificant. A bear can also be a paper one if everyone makes it so together.
Protect communities from attacks. Convince partners to increase pressure. Maximize the Defense Forces’ ability to destroy the bear’s den.
The country’s victory is a great prize; there’s enough glory and recognition for everyone. But first, it has to be won.
After the actual failure of the spring-summer campaign at the front, the terrorist state Russia seems to be moving to a new stage of the war.
The trigger was the strike in Starobilsk. Russian propaganda immediately spun a new record: “innocent children died.” The Kremlin always follows this pattern: first, a military target, then tears at the UN.
In reality, it was about Russian drone system cadets—people aged 19–23, of conscription age, associated with the same drone industry that Putin has today turned into one of the main engines of war.
But that’s not even the main point here.
Starobilsk is Ukraine. Occupied, but Ukraine. And the Russian military, instructors, cadets, UAV operator training centers, and other military infrastructure on Ukrainian territory are legitimate military targets. This answers all the Russian cries at the UN.
But Putin used this episode as a convenient pretext to escalate his campaign of terror against peaceful Ukrainian cities.
The pretext—Starobilsk.
The reason—entirely different.
Due to the development of Ukrainian drone technologies, the creation of kill zones, and superiority in control and communication, especially thanks to Starlink, the Russians are finding it increasingly difficult to advance on the front. Four years of fighting against Ukraine—and years of stalling around points like Mala Tokmachka in Zaporizhzhia—will undoubtedly enter military history as a page of shame for a nuclear state that promised “Kyiv in three days.”
That’s why Russia needs to raise the stakes.
The Kremlin is left with two main cards: missile potential, primarily ballistic, and tactical nuclear weapons as the last-resort threat.
That’s why Russia, through all possible information resources, has begun to threaten the complete destruction of Kyiv. And it’s important to understand: besides symbolic government buildings, priority targets for Russians may become drone manufacturers—those who truly changed the course of the war.
Because Ukraine’s long-range capabilities have created a very unpleasant cognitive dissonance for Russians. Between “Kyiv in three days” and sleeping in corridors of Russian airports, there are four years of war, Ukraine’s technological advantage, and poorly concealed Kremlin panic.
So Putin will raise the stakes. His goals are now evident.
First—to try to destroy Ukraine’s drone potential.
Second—to escalate the situation as much as possible to improve his negotiating position.
And for him, civilian destruction in Ukraine’s capital is the desired backdrop for these negotiations. Because Russia doesn’t know how to come to the negotiating table without blood on its hands. It considers blood an argument.
Hence the statements by Ukrainian officials that a freeze in the war is possible until next November. Until this time, interest in a ceasefire or at least demonstrating a “peace process” will persist in Washington.
In November, the US has midterm elections to Congress, which can significantly change the balance of power and narrow the Trump administration’s opportunities. Therefore, for Trump and Rubio, it is critically important to show results: the fulfillment of a pre-election promise to end the war or at least visible movement towards this. It could become part of the Republicans’ electoral logic.
Russian negotiators have also become more active.
However, they will do everything possible to achieve their main goal—to withdraw Ukrainian forces from Donbas. And one must be prepared for the fact that nuclear blackmail, specifically threats of using tactical nuclear weapons during these highly complex negotiations, will only intensify, as Russian propaganda vividly demonstrates, increasingly echoing “we have no choice”…
This all refers to the fact that ahead of us truly lies a difficult stage with a possible maximum terrorist culmination against the civilian population.
However, there is a chance that this stage will still be the final one in this horrific war…
The latest Russian attack on Kyiv and the Kyiv region is explained by many as Putin’s desire to retaliate for the humiliation he felt while preparing for the parade in Moscow on May 9. Some believe that in this way, Putin is trying to compensate for the actual stopping of his troops in Donetsk region. Others feel that with this attack, Putin is demonstrating to the West his strength and unwillingness to seek any compromises, as well as with nuclear exercises on the territory of Russia and Belarus simultaneously.
But this attack, which I had to wait out at one of the Kyiv subway stations, struck me primarily with its senselessness and uselessness. The Russian president spent billions of rubles to destroy a market and a shopping center, cafes, and a racetrack. The “Oreshnik,” which Putin has been flaunting in recent months, was used to strike a garage cooperative in Bila Tserkva. Even if we believe the explanations that Moscow wanted to destroy some military object in this Ukrainian city, drones and a few ballistic missiles would have sufficed for that.
The Putin I remember from the first days of his presidency has always been cruel, devoid of empathy, cold-blooded, and narcissistic. These traits manifested literally in the early days of his political career amidst the Chechen war or the death of submariners on the “Kursk” submarine. But this Putin knew exactly what he was doing and why. Real signs of inadequacy could be traced back to February 2022, when the Russian president was seriously intent on overthrowing the Ukrainian government and genuinely believed that his army would be greeted with flowers by Ukrainians. But this was likely ideological inadequacy. The Russian president genuinely believes in all these ideological myths he propagates, having been raised on them as a KGB officer. He truly believes that there is no Ukrainian nation, that people cannot defend their future on their own, and cannot independently protest. And indeed, why should a person who once believed that the protesters in Dresden during the last days of the German Democratic Republic were paid change their opinion regarding the Ukrainian Maidan?
But this attack is more a sign of bureaucratic, positional inadequacy. Precisely what Putin could never afford in the past. He has no extra money for the army, yet he spends billions on an attack that changes nothing. It hasn’t affected Ukraine’s military-technical potential. It cannot intimidate people, as intimidation should occur in the first months of a war, not in its fifth year—people who remain in Ukraine have somehow adapted to such horrific trials. What can be achieved with such an attack is merely increasing the level of hatred.
Therefore, I am not surprised when I read articles in Western publications about the Russian president causing disappointment among members of his own circle, the political and business elite of Russia itself. These people can’t be called liberals either; they espouse the same agenda as Putin, convinced of the necessity to regain control over Ukraine and other former Soviet republics, and the importance of confronting the West. Thus, for most of them, Putin is an ideal leader, while the rest are simply intimidated.
What unites these people is the desire for their leader to be adequate in his actions and to realistically assess the situation in Russia and around it. Yet Putin has recently failed to show any adequacy at all. This is evident both in his perception by the population—the rating is noticeably declining—and in the conversations of Russian officials with Western journalists. Therefore, I assume that even such members of Putin’s entourage as Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov and First Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration Sergey Kiriyenko indeed might have tried to dissuade Putin from more stringent restrictions for Russians, but were unsuccessful.
And yes, these people will be dissatisfied but will do nothing to change the situation because they are afraid of Putin. They will wait for either his return to sanity or his end. This makes the Russian president even more unpredictable and dangerous. This is a new Putin—crushed by years of ineffectiveness in the Russian-Ukrainian war and betrayed by his own inadequacy. And future actions by such a Putin should be approached with even greater caution.
