UK drones used for ‘deep strikes’ in mainland Russia for first time
By Dana Whitfield ·
The sheer volume of reported strikes—from Ukrainian drones hitting a Wildberries warehouse in Podolsk, as The Moscow Times reports, to Ukraine targeting missile fuel facilities in…
The Arithmetic of Exhaustion
The sheer volume of reported strikes—from Ukrainian drones hitting a Wildberries warehouse in Podolsk, as The Moscow Times reports, to Ukraine targeting missile fuel facilities in Rostov Oblast, and even striking drone storage sites near Novofedorivka, per Ukrinform—is less a measure of military success than it is of profound exhaustion. The reporting paints a picture of total war, where the battlefield has dissolved into every civilian logistics hub, warehouse, and industrial area. While the Ukrainian General Staff boasts about striking facilities used for drone preparation in Hvardiyiske, Ukrinform notes that this action is merely one piece of an escalating pattern: strikes against infrastructure on both sides, as highlighted by France 24's coverage of Ukraine’s largest recent attacks. This isn't the strategic targeting of a coherent military objective; it is the chaotic flailing of two systems running on fumes and fueled by political necessity rather than operational logic.
When Competence Becomes Obsolete
The most capable advocate for this current strategy would argue that these deep, asymmetrical strikes prove Ukraine’s continued capacity to project force far into Russian territory, degrading critical economic lifelines like Wildberries' logistics centers across multiple regions. They would point to the sheer number of drones destroyed—822, according to Russia’s Defense Ministry—as evidence of a successful defensive counter-effort. But this misses the fundamental arithmetic: competence is defined by reliable systems and predictable outcomes, not by volume. The constant escalation, where every blow lands near a civilian center or vital economic artery, demonstrates that neither side has abandoned the principle of proportionality for the novelty of spectacle.
The Echoes of Vietnam War’s Unending Cycle
This cycle—the protracted asymmetrical warfare involving external powers supporting local forces engaged in deep penetration strikes against enemy infrastructure and population centers—is not unprecedented. It is a textbook echo of the Vietnam War. In that conflict, the core mechanism was the inability to distinguish between legitimate military targets and civilian life; the fighting spilled into Laotian and Cambodian civil wars because the objectives were never truly limited to the front line. What we are witnessing now is the same failure: the blurring of lines until every warehouse becomes a potential battleground, rendering any claim of strategic advantage meaningless.
The true cost of this mutual commitment to magical thinking—the belief that sheer volume or continuous strikes will force an opponent to concede ground or policy—is simply unsustainable. The institutions designed for stable governance and predictable trade are being systematically dismantled by the rhetoric of perpetual crisis. What is required is a return to the boring, trustworthy competence of deal-making; what we have received instead is only noise.