(Image by NEIVANMADE)
Last night YY_Sima Qian asked:
Adam, I under & fully agree w/ the moral/pragmatic imperative to highlight Russian war crimes, including those via missile strikes. However; in addition to summarizing the civilian toll from the Russian crimes, do we have a sense of the targets that might have more immediate impact on the war that might have been struck? The Russians were targeting power generation & transmission infrastructure through the winter to degrade Ukrainian industrial capacity & create harsher conditions for the Ukrainian civilian population. What are they targeting now?
A more “rational” target list would still include power infrastructure, transportation links, Ukrainian weapons plants, munitions depots, & especially staging areas for Ukrainian units gathering for the upcoming offensive. Sometimes I see posts about Russian missiles striking Ukrainian depots or other presumably important military targets on Chinese social media, w/ likely from Russian social media. However, they are invariably exaggerated & often fabricated. OTOH, I am not seeing many reports targets more relevant to the Ukrainian war effort on Western MSM or social media. Either Ukraine is keeping mum on the effects of the strikes much like their casualties, or the Russians really are using their increasingly precious cruise missile solely as terror weapons.
Also, 15 cruise missiles launched from 11 strategic bombers is really inefficient operations.
My understanding from the news reporting and analysis from subject matter experts is that the Russians are still targeting civilian infrastructure including civilian residences – both apartments and homes. The purpose seems to be twofold. The first is to terrorize the Ukrainians as much as possible in the attempt to break their resilience and cohesion; both personal/psychological and social/societal. The second is to force the Ukrainians to both position their air defense assets in locations to defend against these strikes and then to draw down their precious munitions stocks trying to stop them. This is intended to result in Ukrainian air defense not be available on the lines of contact and axes of battle with the Russians and to deplete the Ukrainian air defense capacity and capability so that it isn’t available for use in combat against the Russian reinvaders.
It is unfortunately, then appropriate to indicate that the air defense is active over Kyiv:
Series of explosions over Kyiv moments ago woke me from sleep. Sounded like Ukrainian air defense at work. The Ukrainian capital is under air raid alert.
— Christopher Miller (@ChristopherJM) May 2, 2023
This is the current air raid alert map for Ukraine as of 6:45 PM EDT:
Here is President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today. Video below, English transcript after the jump: