Vladimir Putin has marked the New Year by firing more than 500 missiles “of all types” against Ukraine, hitting Kyiv, Odessa, and most other major cities in recurrent strikes over last weekend in an unprecedented blitz to overwhelm Ukraine’s air defenses as the war goes into its third year. He threatened to “intensify strikes” following Ukraine’s retaliation with home-produced kamikaze drones against the Belgorod army base inside Russia.
Days prior, Putin appeared to toss an olive branch to the Ukrainians upon his return from Saudi Arabia, whose rulers have long expressed interest in brokering a peace deal. “If they want to negotiate, let them negotiate,” he said begrudgingly at a press conference, emphasizing that any negotiations would be based on “safeguarding Russian interests.” He indicated no willingness to concede occupied territory, which is Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s precondition for talks.
There have been some minor advances by Russian forces in their critical battle of Avdiivka for control of the central Donbas region, but at a huge cost: Some estimates put Russia’s daily casualty rate at 1,000, exceeding that of last winter’s fight for Bakhmut. The mounting death toll could prove an embarrassment for Putin as Russia goes into an election year when angry mothers and wives of the more than 350,000 soldiers killed or crippled may stage protests during the vote, in which war opponents are banned from the ballot.
Putin takes extreme security measures, moving unpredictably between the Kremlin and safehouses at palaces, estates, and military installations across Russia fitted with exact replicas of his Kremlin office so that he can give televised speeches, hold teleconferences, and issue orders without giving away his location. He is closely protected by 3,000 bodyguards, the largest presidential protection force in the world. They are carefully selected and lavished with titles, land grants, business concessions, and other state privileges to ensure their loyalty, much as Saddam Hussein protected himself from assassination plots and internal palace intrigues in Iraq.
He may have strengthened his position recently by taking the advice of FSB spymaster Nikolai Patrushev on assassinating rogue Wagner mercenary leader and one-time close confidante Yevgeny Prigozhin and nine of his closest aides, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. Putin authorized an undercover team to plant a small explosive device under the wing of Prigozhin’s jet, which exploded shortly after takeoff to make it appear an accident. CIA sources consulted by The American Spectator say the bomb could have been activated with an altimeter fuse similar to the way Muammar Gaddafi engineered the Lockerbie air disaster.
Putin’s relations with the FSB had suffered during his disastrous failure to take Kyiv at the start of the invasion in 2022, which he blamed on poor intelligence reporting. He sacked or jailed some 150 of its agents. But the agency in which Putin formed himself as an officer in its Soviet forerunner KGB regained his confidence by quelling support for Prigozhin’s coup attempt last June and heading a subsequent purge of the military, even at the cost of removing some of Russia’s most competent generals who had agreed with Prigozhin’s criticisms of the defense bureaucracy.
Putin may have unleashed his latest blitz by expending some of Russia’s most lethal hypersonic missiles, like the X22, with speeds of 4,000 mph, which can only be intercepted by American Patriot missiles and of which there are few in stock, over fury at the loss of yet another Russian warship at harbor in Crimea. The LST Novocherkassk was destroyed with about 100 crewmen on board by a highly precise cruise missile strike while unloading a cargo of Iranian Shahed kamikaze drones, igniting their high explosive components that caused the massive blast in the ship, according to analysts. It’s the 20th Russian navy vessel to go down around Crimea, frustrating Putin’s key objective of controlling the Black Sea.
With the war largely stalemated despite Russia’s staggering losses, Putin may have also coldly calculated that his best hope for forcing Ukraine’s capitulation was unleashing a long-planned onslaught to accomplish from the air what his demoralized troops seem unable to do on the ground. Blockages of NATO aid for Ukraine due to internal political divisions in the U.S. and other Western nations, whose attention is further diverted by the escalating war in Gaza and the Red Sea, may have also contributed to his timing.
According to professor Michael Clarke, former director of London’s Royal United Services Institute, semi-official think tank of the British Ministry of Defense, Russia plans to wear down Ukraine’s air defenses with drones and subsonic missiles to create “gaps” in its shield before ramping up strikes with hypersonic missiles that have been held in reserve for when Patriot SAMs are depleted. Ukraine has only three Patriot batteries supplied by the U.S. and Germany concentrated around Kyiv.
The Ukrainians are learning not to waste Patriots on subsonic threats while directing other AA systems against drones and conventional Russian cruise missiles like the Kinzhals most commonly used by Russia, according to Clarke. But he warns that depletion of lower grade air defenses can also leave Ukraine dangerously exposed. “So far the Ukrainians are managing to shoot down 80 to 90 percent of the Shaheds but if that were to drop down to sixty percent, the country’s power grid could be taken out,” he said in a recent Times radio interview.
The U.K. has rushed 100 SAMs to replenish Ukrainian stocks, and Japan is sending a Patriot battery to protect Odessa despite Russian threats to join Chinese naval exercises around its waters. Each Patriot battery equipped with 60 PAC SAM missiles costs $1 billion. Their steady provision can only be guaranteed through the $62 billion in U.S. military aid that remains stuck in negotiations between Congress and the Biden administration, which continues resisting Republican demands to stop the dangerously high migrant flow from Mexico.
A European Union package of over $50 billion is similarly blocked by the veto of Hungarian President Viktor Orban, who is pressuring the European Commission to release $25 billion in subsidies being withheld from his government over his authoritarian domestic policies. Orban also favors a negotiated settlement with Russia involving the partition of Ukraine, and he recently invited Ukrainian opposition leader Petro Poroshenko to Budapest.
Ukraine’s more vulnerable neighbors strongly fear Russian encroachments if western aid falters. A high-level presidential aide in Moldova told The American Spectator that Russia spent $50 million to finance pro-Moscow parties in recent elections in which the pro-Western government barely managed to hold on with 30 percent of the vote. Russian troops stationed in Moldova’s breakaway province of Transnistria have recently staged exercises that are highly unsettling to the government in Chișinău, which has no NATO membership and a very small army.
President Zelensky wants to turn Ukraine into an armaments hub through joint industrial projects planned with Germany’s Rheinmetal and other Western defense contractors for domestic production of sophisticated drones, infantry fighting vehicles, artillery pieces, ammunition, air defense systems, and cruise missiles. He is seeking to organize Ukraine’s defense enterprises as private sector ventures to lock in finance through long-term contracts instead of mainly relying on U.S. and European government aid.
“We must strengthen our state to the point where Russia feels that every one of their strikes will face our retaliation. This task can only be accomplished through sufficient domestic arms manufacturing…. this year alone it was possible to produce three times more weapons and equipment than last year,” he said at a late December meeting with executives of state and private defense companies employing 300,000 Ukrainians.
Ukraine’s main arms producer, Ukroboronprom, recently announced “mass production” of an enhanced version of Iran’s Shahed — 136 loitering munitions expanding the range to 1,000 kilometers, adding stealth features and increasing the explosive payload of its UJ-26 Beaver “analogue” undoubtedly used in last weekend’s strike on Belgorod. Seventy drones were launched, of which almost two-thirds penetrated Russian air defenses.
The European Expert Association on Ukraine says that 40 American F-16s that are in the pipeline to Ukraine will be a “game changer.” Their radar capacity to reach targets over the horizon could neutralize threats from Russia’s fourth generation Su-34 and Su-35 fighter bombers, which are increasingly deployed in front-line bombing raids and stand-off missile attacks.
Russia’s air force may up the ante, introducing new fifth-generation Su-57 fighters, according to defense spokesmen. They have only been incorporated in small numbers and are still at the testing stage, say NATO analysts, but Russian military expenditures are set to rise by 68 percent in 2024, according to defense minister Shoigu, absorbing 30 percent of GDP in an economy many times larger than Ukraine’s.
Zelensky remains resolute. “Who brings hell on our land will soon see it outside their window,” he said as missiles fell on Kyiv this past weekend. It may be bombastic rhetoric to pump up support for his increasingly embattled government whose visions of victory are called “delusional” by a former adviser, but he may have a wild card up his sleeve.
Ukraine has vastly outperformed the Russians in special operations. Marines and a highly secretive army unit called Center 73 continue infiltrating into Russian-held sectors of the southern Dnipro river, persistently frustrating Russian attempts to root them out. They may link up with partisan groups expanding guerrilla activity around the southern city of Melitopol and Crimea.
Sabotage of railway lines, bombings of state installations, and assassinations of Russian officials are growing in frequency in the southern region as Moscow finds increasing difficulties recruiting locals to fill administrative posts for fear of partisan hit squads. The growing guerrilla network may extend into Russia, where assassinations of pro-Putin politicians and locally staged drone strikes, which have even reached the Kremlin, occur sporadically.
A founder of U.S. special forces, Lt. Gen. Sam Wilson, once talked to me about a highly classified operation during the starting days of the Cold War that involved parachuting secret agents into the Soviet Union “to do to Stalin what the Bolsheviks did to the Czar.” They were mostly captured or killed, but Ukraine’s special forces with built-in capacities to act in the region are proving creative and adept at high-risk undertakings and could yet pull some surprises.
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