Yesterday’s top news story was not the easiest one to swallow, like an overly spicy hot dog.
Let’s start with what we know almost for a fact.
A squad of fighters from the Russian Volunteer Corps, a unit of the Territorial Defense Forces of Ukraine formed
in August 2022 from Russian right-wing volunteers, has crossed the Russian border in the Bryansk Region
and done something: they did shoot a couple of videos… and some locals, before going back.
The regional government has announced that there are two civilians dead and several wounded.
That is the reality we live in now: Russian right-wing nationalists are fighting on the side of Ukraine.
There’s nothing to comment really, that’s something we just have to accept.
We’ve just found ourselves in a postmodern dystopian novel.
Another point is that we haven’t seen a single dead or arrested.
It seems that Russia hasn’t got anything to show for itself, which would mean the raid was a success.
Russian state media in the meantime were generating one narrative after another.
There was an attack on a school bus, a whole village taken hostage, a murder of a child with a subsequent resurrection,
an anti-terrorist activity, and an emergency meeting of the Security Council of Russia.
Judging by the speed the narratives were changing they did not know what to do with that information.
Since the official version settled on driving a 40-strong “group of terrorists” back to Ukraine with artillery fire,
there is only one conclusion we can make.
The Russian border is very much permeable to the enemy. It is not guarded at all,
which means that Russian officials realized that they had been attacked only after the fact.
After all the photos had been taken, videos shot, and the enemy had gone back home. That’s wartime, mind you.
That raises the obvious question. If that has been done by a single squad, raiding the villages near the border
and coming back home unscathed, what could be done if they had a battalion or a brigade?
It won’t happen of course, but how long would it take Moscow to realize they lost a region
if some hotheads decided to cross the border and occupy the Bryansk Region?
It still boggles my mind how that ragtag bunch could come to a decision to start an all-out war in Europe.
It is so incredibly pathetic that it doesn’t cease to amaze me.
It’s a screw-up worse than Mathias Rust’s surprise landing on Bolshoy Moskvoretsky Bridge.
The USSR wasn’t tied up in a war against its neighbor in 1987 and did not expect an attack on its territory.
That bunch, on the other hand, is busy telling everyone how they will go about splitting the world with the U.S.
but are unable to prevent armed squads from crossing its borders.
Is that what your geopolitics and a multi-polar world look like? Is that how you protect “Russia’s interests”?
You’ve crossed the borders of another country while powerless to protect your own.
It is a bloody, inhumane war. There are war crimes committed daily.
This war is despicable; it’s a manifestation of the grievances and delusional vanity of one man.
But it is also a humiliating one.
We couldn’t even imagine how naked they were under that blanket of peacock feathers of PR stunts and lies.
All their Imperial crown jewels were made out of duct tape and frozen farts.
To make the humiliation total and to ensure everyone sees it, Vladimir Putin canceled his trip to Stavropol.
It was a public announcement. Russian right-wingers that had defected to Ukraine raided Bryansk,
which made Putin cancel his trip to Stavropol.
There are six hundred miles between those two Russian cities as a crow flies.
Just to put that into perspective, Stavropol is four hundred miles away from Yerevan, the capital of Armenia.
We can assume that Putin will no longer go to any border region of Russia. Regardless of who that border is with.
He will be scared of an armed bunch to come and kick his scrawny butt.
That’s how the king and ruler of Russia rolls now: he can no longer go everywhere he wants.
NEW PHASE
That story about Putin is humiliating and somewhat funny. It shows the real state of affairs in Russia.
The other one is way more serious, though. It sets the stage for the next phase of this war.
We are now getting news about drone attacks on Russia every day.
Ukrainian kamikaze drones are hitting the Moscow Region, not just the ones near the border.
We’ve seen it before. Tu-141 Strizh “Swift” drones have hit strategic air force bases in the Saratov Region before.
That is further from the border than Moscow even.
But those drones are unique; Ukraine has a very limited supply of them since they are the remnants of the USSR.
Those new attacks are carried out by Ukraine-made mass-produced kamikaze drones.
Let’s have a look at what makes those kamikaze drones so deadly and clever at the same time.
There are three main advantages to drones: price, simplicity, and numbers. By definition, a drone is unmanned.
There is no fighter pilot that you need to train for decades.
It means that resilience can go out the window.
The overwhelming need to protect human life is out of the question when it comes to drones.
That protection is one of the things which makes planes so expensive, and heavy too.
Why are Iranian drones colloquially known as “scooters”?
Because they do use two-stroke engines from a scooter, and their putt-putt noise is unmistakable.
There is no need to use a plane engine. Nobody is concerned with reliability much:
it’s cheaper to lose five of those drones than to buy a single plane engine.
Any motor capable of running the prop and carrying an explosive payload is good enough for a kamikaze drone.
That makes those drones a deadly weapon.
The war of the machines, despite what sci-fi novels taught us in the 20th century, is not high-tech — it’s low-tech, instead.
A kamikaze drone doesn’t need to climb to a super-high altitude and be supersonic.
It doesn’t need stealth technologies or be able to dodge SAM rockets. It can chug along at low altitudes and speeds.
It’s almost undetectable by radars since it’s mostly made of plastic.
Sure, if a SAM site detects the drone, it will be shot down. But an anti-air missile costs a king’s ransom compared to a drone.
There’s no need to ensure that every drone hits its target, no need to complicate it.
Quite the opposite, in fact: it should be as simple and cheap as possible.
That will allow sending hordes of drones at a time.
Some of them will just run out of juice or will be shot down by AA missiles, some will lose their way, and so be it.
The main thing is that every third, fifth, or tenth drone will reach its objective.
A cruise missile capable of hitting a target the size of a bus at 400 miles is an engineering marvel.
They are made in low quantities at the cost of millions of dollars per piece.
The yearly production of those missiles even for the most advanced economies like
the American one measures in triple digits only.
If your name is not Vladimir Putin and you are not ready to launch your stock of rockets that has been
painstakingly collected over decades just to impress the public, every use of those missiles is a carefully planned operation.
They require a proper selection of targets and a flight path to avoid SAM sites.
Using the missiles willy-nilly will see you broke pretty fast.
All that doesn’t apply to kamikaze drones. That’s their deadly strength: they are simple and cheap.
The manufacturing only uses civil-grade components and can be done by pretty much anyone.
You don’t need a full-scale industry infrastructure for it.
That copter or a fixed-wing aircraft made out of scrap can cause a lot of damage, though.
Drones being simple and cheap explains why Russia hadn’t made a lot of weapons of that type before the war started.
It explains why Russia had to quickly buy them in Iran.
You can’t get insanely rich, or write off billions, by cobbling together a plastic drone with a lawnmower engine.
It’s not a fear-inducing weapon you can show at parades or pose in front of. You can’t sell that donkey for a horse.
When Iranian drones appeared in Ukraine’s sky, though, some thought Russia had found a silver bullet.
You can’t effectively counter them. Shooting down nine would still have the tenth reaching the objective
and causing damage tens, sometimes hundreds, or thousands of times more than the drone’s worth.
The terrorists that were happy attacking the energy infrastructure and houses with those drones
forgot one simple thing: two can play that game.
The enemy can manufacture their own fleet of kamikaze drones.
Russian AA weapons will be as useless against them as the Ukrainian are.
It's not difficult to shoot them down. Ukrainians managed to do so using machine guns.
These beaters are sputtering at 100 miles an hour at a low altitude.
There are electronic countermeasures, too, allowing you to down those drones.
They are being developed all the time. It’s been half a year since those attacks started,
and Ukraine came up with a lot of ways to destroy them.
If you shoot 90 out of 100 drones, however, it is still bad.
Ten of those drones, each carrying up to 50 lbs. of explosives, would slip through air defenses too busy
with the other 90 and go on to wreak death and destruction.
Russia is even more vulnerable to massive drone strikes than Ukraine due to its size.
It’s got a vast territory with overstretched communications.
There are loads of critical objects, you can’t afford a manned guard for all of them, let alone a SAM site.
If Ukraine has managed to set up mass production of kamikaze drones, the attacks on minor target,
and explosions we see today are the trials and field testing. If that is true, we are entering a new phase of the war.
A stage where it’s irrelevant what parts of occupied territories Russia will be able to keep.
It will raise new questions: when and how will the attacks on Russia’s lands and its critical objects in the deep rear stop?
Those are places where people thought war to be something distant and non-important.
There can come a time when large cities, Moscow included, will have daily explosions.
The government, Putin and all, won’t have the slightest idea how to prevent that.
Putin, who started his pointless conquest, is now unable to protect his own territories.
WHAT DOES THE PLAN SAY?
You can’t ignore such a threat on your own territory. It’s not something you can just brush off.
Saying it doesn’t concern you won’t work any more.
One can’t care less if Kyiv has been captured or Kherson has been surrendered.
One can even ignore the mobilization drive and the casualties.
That can all be turned away from right to the point it comes into your home. 50 lbs. of explosives over your head
can’t be just ignored.
It’s not a fly you can swat away.
If the war does enter that stage, it will be a new political reality in Russia. One that has air raid sirens and explosions.
The reality they have brought upon themselves by all those conquests. You can’t laugh that off.
You can’t just say “It’s not my business.
The government started it, let them take care of it.” It is obvious by now that they can’t do it.
There is a chance that all that indifference will turn into panic.
The difference between a Ukrainian drone and a Russian mobilization drive is that Putin cannot control the former.
He can’t stop it with a decree.
What do those news stories have in common: the attack on the Bryansk villages and the potential risk
of a drone war deep inside Russia?
The common denominator is the total inability of Russian officials to calculate the consequences of their actions.
Their train of thought has proven to be a choo-choo train.
What were they thinking starting the largest and the bloodiest war in Europe in the past 80 years before
making their own borders safe?
How could they come to a decision to attack another country with just fig leaves covering their junk?
What were they thinking jumping with joy at watching hundreds of Iranian drones being sent to attack
the energy infrastructure and homes of their neighbor?
You need to have mush for brains to start something like that in the 21st century. Did you think they won't fire back?
Did they really think that making a kamikaze drone is rocket science?
That Iran, sanctioned to their eyebrows, was the only one capable of designing them?
They decided to play that game while unable to protect their vast skies. Do they want to see whose goalie is better?
There was nobody to ask the “what if” question on the Russian side.
There was no plan B. Nobody was asking what would happen if Ukraine retaliated to Russia’s attempt at crapping
all over Ukrainian territory.
What would be the evacuation plan?
The past six months of the war have been a pathetic attempt to show at least some good news from the frontlines.
To show no matter the cost. The cost of life tohave Soledar on the front page was enormous.
If there are going to be persistent explosions in Russia, there will be no point in talking about the frontlines.
Nobody will give a rat’s ass what village they captured or which backroads they lost another battalion on.
It will be the beginning of a new war. Not the one they started on February 24th.
It will be a war on Russian territory, not on TV.
See you tomorrow!