Ukraine’s daring strikes on Russian soil risk a catastrophic escalation

Finally, Russians are getting a taste of their own medicine. From the drone strike on the Kremlin to missiles hitting airfields in Ryazan, to the raid on seven villages this week, Ukrainian strikes on Russian soil are increasing – and Kyiv appears to have abandoned its long held omerta on claiming responsibility for such attacks.

Revenge is undoubtedly sweet. After relentless months of heartbreaking news footage of Russian missiles slamming into Ukrainian cities, there was something darkly thrilling about watching a drone exploding into the roof of Kremlin Palace. But is revenge smart?

As Ukraine steps up its campaign of sabotage and raids inside Russia, it’s worth asking whether such attacks hinder or help Putin’s floundering war effort. And most importantly, whether bringing the war to Russia’s homeland could give Putin an excuse to use nukes – allowed, by Russian military doctrine, only in response to “existential threats to the territory of the Motherland” – and thereby force Nato to get involved directly in an escalating conflict.

This week a small force of Russian volunteers fighting for Ukraine raided and briefly occupied seven villages and a border post inside Russia’s Belgorod region, just opposite the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. Calling themselves the Russian Volunteer Corps and the Free Russia Legion, the group claimed to be acting independently of the Ukrainian army and government – though they drove into Russia from Ukraine in US-supplied Humvees.

On one level, the Belgorod raid was a brilliant psy-op. The fact that a force of at least 100 heavily armed men could simply drive through a Russian border post (killing the handful of guards), occupy 40 kilometres of territory for at least two days, blow up ammunition stores and force the hasty evacuation of nuclear-armed artillery shells from a nearby Army garrison showed just how vulnerable Russia is to attack. The local authorities’ slow and bungled response to the raid caused Belgorod locals to take to social media, complaining that the state could no longer protect them.

But the raid could also have been an own goal. In Moscow, TV propagandists went into overdrive, denouncing Nato for fighting an all-out war to destroy Russia. Nationalist member of the Russian parliament Aleksey Zhuravlyov called for “mass mobilisation of a three-million strong army,” while TV host Vladimir Solovyev redoubled his calls for using strategic nukes against the West in retribution.

Putin has little to show for a year’s pummelling of Ukraine. To hold against a coming advance, he needs many more soldiers - but has been wary of announcing a new wave of mobilisation (his last drive prompted nationwide protests). However, cross-border attacks against Russian territory reinforce the narrative that Putin is defending his people from a foreign threat, rather than waging a war of aggression in Ukraine – and could give him the excuse he needs to escalate the conflict into Russia’s new great patriotic war.

When the Russian leader spoke on Tuesday, in the aftermath of the Belgorod raid, he claimed that Russia “did not start any war” but rather was “trying to stop the war that is being waged against us, against our people.”

While little is known about the two self-described Russian “partisan groups” who raided Belgorod, several of the citizens involved are well-known neo-Nazis. Putin and his propagandists have regularly, and ridiculously, claimed that the Kyiv government is run by Nazis and launched their invasion in part to ‘de-Nazify’ Ukraine.

In reality, there is just one ultranationalist member of Ukraine’s 450-strong Rada parliament and electoral support for far-right groups is in the low single figures. Yet deploying literal Nazis – albeit Russian ones – in a raid on Russian territory is hardly the best way to disprove the Kremlin’s wild allegations.

The US has made it very clear that it disapproves of Ukrainian sabotage and terror operations inside Russia. In August 2022, American officials took the unprecedented step of admonishing Ukrainian officials over the car-bomb assassination of the daughter of ultranationalist philosopher Aleksandr Dugin. The Biden administration has also held back on supplying medium-range rocket artillery systems known as Atacms – with a 300km range as opposed to the already-gifted 80km of the Himars system – precisely for fear that Kyiv could use them for attacks inside Russia.

As General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said, the US’s priority is to defeat Putin while “avoiding a kinetic war with Russia”.

Ukraine’s charismatic young chief of military intelligence, the 37-year-old Major General Kyrylo Budanov, observes no such niceties. Earlier this month, he abandoned a long-held taboo on claiming responsibility for sabotage and attacks inside Russia by frankly admitting that Ukrainian intelligence had co-ordinated a large number of train de-railings, warehouse fires, ammunition and fuel dump explosions that have become an almost daily feature of Russian life over recent months. There has been speculation that Budanov, with his daring aggression, may have exceeded his authority and is not wholly under President Volodimir Zelensky’s control. But if recently leaked US intelligence briefings are to be believed, Zelensky himself shocked his US supporters by advocating the sabotage of Russian oil and gas pipelines supplying Putin-sympathising Hungary.

If Zelensky did approve the Belgorod raids – which he and the Kyiv government have denied – he’s playing a desperately dangerous game. Attacks inside Russia proper are a legitimate “casus belli”, according to Moscow’s nuclear doctrine. And top Nato commanders, according to a source of mine, are still seriously concerned about the use of tactical nukes by the Kremlin.

Pushing back Russia from Ukrainian territory is right and just. But invading the world’s largest nuclear armed power risks a catastrophic escalation and strengthening, rather than weakening, Putin’s flagging war machine.