TALLINN, Estonia — Moscow’s barrage of missile strikes on cities all across Ukraine has elicited celebratory comments from Russian officials and pro-Kremlin pundits, who in recent weeks have actively criticised the Russian military for a series of embarrassing setbacks on the battlefield, Ap reported.
Russian nationalist commentators and state media war correspondents lauded Monday’s attack as an appropriate, and long-awaited, response to a successful Ukrainian counteroffensive and a weekend attack on the bridge between Russia and Crimea, the prized Black Sea peninsula Russia annexed in 2014.
Many of them argued that Moscow should keep up the intensity of Monday’s strikes to win the war now. Some analysts suggested that Russian President Vladimir Putin was becoming a hostage of his allies’ views on how the campaign in Ukraine should unfold.
“Putin’s initiative is weakening, and he is becoming more dependent on circumstances and those who are forging the ‘victory’ (in Ukraine) for him,” Tatyana Stanovaya, founder of the independent R.Politik think tank, wrote in an online commentary Monday.
“The fear of defeat is so strong, especially for those who are now fully immersed in this military venture, that Putin’s indecisiveness, with his logic of ‘We have not started anything yet’ and ‘Restrained tactics have paid off’ has become a problem,” the analyst said.
For weeks, Putin’s supporters have called for drastic battlefield steps in Ukraine. The exhortations intensified over the weekend after an explosion on the Kerch Bridge linking Crimea to Russia; the bridge, Europe’s longest, is a prominent symbol of Russian military might. Putin himself opened the span in 2018.
“And?” Margarita Simonyan, head of Russia’s state-funded RT television, wondered on social media about Moscow’s response to the Saturday bridge attack.
“This is one of those cases when the country needs to show we can hit back,” wrote Alexander Kots, a war correspondent for the popular pro-Kremlin tabloid newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda.
Senior Russian lawmaker Sergei Mironov, who leads the state-backed A Just Russia party, tweeted Saturday that Moscow should disregard Western opinion in formulating its answer to the conspicuous attack.
“It is time for fighting! Fiercely, even cruelly. Without looking back at whatever censures from the West,” Mironov, who leads the state-backed A Just Russia party, tweeted Saturday. “There won’t be any bigger sanctions. They won’t say any worse words. We need to do our thing. We started it — we should go till the end. There is no way back. Time to respond!”
The response came Monday morning, when Russia simultaneously launched dozens of missiles at Ukrainian cities, killing and wounding scores and inflicting unprecedented damage on Ukraine’s critical infrastructure. The strikes, which hit 15 Ukrainian cities, most of them regional capitals, knocked out power lines, damaged railway stations and roads, and left cities without water supplies.
For the first time in months, Russian missiles exploded in the heart of Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, in dangerous proximity to government buildings.
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