Zelensky 40-Day Plan to Force Russian Talks With Drones – Huge Damage, But No Peace

Ukraine’s unprecedented 40-day drone bombardment campaign launched to force the Kremlin to the peace table failed to deliver a ceasefire but inflicted serious and potentially disastrous damage to Russian military logistics, with explosives-toting Ukrainian aircraft flying hundreds of sorties daily mostly unopposed deep behind Russian lines for more than a month.On June 25, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced his country’s armed forces had kicked off a 40-day campaign targeting the Kremlin’s military supply operations on land in Russia-occupied territory in southern Ukraine, and on water in the Azov and northern Black Seas. The main objective of the assault operations, he said, was to make Russian military operations in southern Ukraine untenable and to force his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, to agree to ceasefire talks.JOIN US ON TELEGRAMFollow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official.The Ukrainian bid to batter Russia to the peace table in less than six weeks had visibly failed by late July, with Putin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov declaring the Ukrainian attacks were meaningless and that the Kremlin’s war aims are unchanged.“We are continuing our special military operation, and we are continuing to achieve our goals by military means,” Peskov said in a July 28 nationally televised interview. “This is not the preferred path, but in the absence of prospects for peace, we will press on until we reach complete victory.” Other Topics of Interest Russia May Launch 100 Ballistic Missiles at Ukraine Every Month Russia would continue striking warehouses, factories, and logistics centers as Ukraine struggles with a shortage of Patriot interceptors. But, on that day, according to Russian official sources, close to 400 Ukrainian long-range drones breached Russian Federation airspace to hit targets primarily around Crimea and Russian-occupied southeastern Ukraine.Perhaps poetically, a secondary air attack hit and set fire to a logistics super-warehouse near the Moscow satellite city of Podolsk, less than 20 miles from the Kremlin where Peskov’s defiant comments were recorded.On Aug. 4, at the exact 40-day mark, the Ukrainian deep attack bombardment campaign was still very much in earnest.Probably the most solid of indicators was a Russian Ministry of Defense announcement that its air defense forces spotted and engaged 1,158 Ukrainian Armed Forces (AFU) drones encroaching on Russian airspace, marking not just the most sizable one-night drone raid carried out by either side in the entire Russo-Ukrainian War, but in history.The targets that night were two oil refineries, a super-warehouse operated by the Amazon-similar company, Wildberries, a Volga region strategic bomber base, a Kaluga region fuel base, and four Russian kamikaze drone storage and launch sites. 450+ drones flew the next night’s raids.Thanks to hundreds of videos recorded and uploaded to the internet by Russian small-scale traders watching drones lazily crash and explode, hitting Wildberries warehouses, attacks against logistics deep inside Russia have probably been the best-documented piece of the Ukrainian effort to damage Russian public support of Putin.As of Wednesday, at least 14 Wildberries super-warehouses had been hit, and in about half the cases the warehouse was destroyed by fire. Russian commercial media have put the value of damage caused to the corporation at $2 billion so far.Wildberries CEO Tatiana Kim on Aug. 1 in a recorded statement said traders having seen warehouse-held stock destroyed by fire “would be compensated,” without stating timelines or value, and claimed her company was taking effective steps to mitigate the Ukrainian attacks.“Together we will prevail,” Kim told customers.Two more warehouses were hit after she made that promise, most recently on Wednesday with drones penetrating some 185 miles (300 kilometers) into airspace above Russia’s Tula region. By afternoon, when this article was published, fires had engulfed the facility, and firefighters seemed unable to control it.Wildberries, on Aug. 2, banned traders from carrying smartphones into warehouses “for security reasons.” Uploads of the recent Tula fire appeared to have been recorded from outside the warehouse gate.According to Ukraine’s national intelligence agency, the SBU, a key participant in the 40-day campaign, its agents and operators have flown hundreds of attack missions hitting more than 1,700 high-priority targets.Military facilities were top priorities, the Tuesday SBU assessment said, with drones hitting the Russian Saky, Hvardiyske and Belbek military air bases in Crimea. One drone raid, on July 1 against Saky, caught two Russian MiG-29 fighters and two jet trainers on the ground, destroying them. Russia-loyal milblogger channels, SBU video, and later satellite imagery confirmed the probably serious damage to all the aircraft.A precision deep attack into the Russian Federation’s Samara region, undated publicly but probably taking place in late July, struck a Tu-95M “Bear” bomber parked on the tarmac, with a single Ukrainian $75,000 drone hitting and breaking the tail of the four-engine $5-10 million (in multiple-decade-old pricing) turboprop.Satellite imagery made public on Aug. 1 showed stabilizers and rudder blasted off the fuselage and the aircraft a total loss. Hangers and fuel infrastructure also were hit.Parallel with the SBU-led deep assault campaign against high-value targets, Ukraine over the 40-day operation unleashed its military-subordinate drone forces, the USF (Ukrainian: Сили безпілотних систем, or Unpiloted Systems Force), against shorter-range targets, typically 30-150 kilometers (18-90 miles) behind the front lines. According to USF statements, operators and UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) have, since late June, been conducting a three-prong operation targeting Russian logistics supporting occupation forces in the Crimean Peninsula on land and at sea.USF commander Robert “Magyar” Brovdi, in comments published in early July, identified seven veteran drone outfits as the backbone of the attacks: the 414th Brigade “Magyar’s Birds,” 9th Battalion “Kairos,” 412th Brigade “Nemesis,” 413th Regiment “Raid,” 427th Brigade “Rarog,” 20th Brigade “K-2” and the secretive 1st Separate USF Center.The prime target for the Ukrainian aircraft has been oil tankers, with top priority given to vessels thought to be members of the Kremlin’s shadow tanker fleet, but cargo ships have been hit as well, usually near the sea bottleneck Kerch Strait connecting the Sea of Azov to the Black Sea.In the past 40 days, according to shipping industry sources, between 100 and 150 civilian ships, usually with third-nation flags, have been hit by Ukrainian drones patrolling waters around the strait.The most common offensive tactic has been flying an attack drone into the bridge of a cargo ship with the objective of destroying navigation and communications equipment, and injuring key members of the crew.Ukrainian sea drones – remote-controlled motorboats carrying as much as a ton of explosive – sank a Russian government-operated container ship overnight July 31-Aug. 1. Satellite imagery published on Saturday showed at least 20 oil tankers had sailed up the Don River to the riverine port of Rostov, probably to shelter under city air defenses.Imagery from the worldwide shipping tracker MarineTraffic showed no civilian ship traffic at all moving on either side of the Kerch Strait. According to Ukrainian military intelligence, of the five ferries normally operating between mainland Russia and Crimea, three are badly damaged and inoperable, and the other two can only move with tugboat assistance.The second piece of the anti-Crimea assault operation, attacking cargo truck movements from southwest Russia to the peninsula via occupied portions of Ukraine’s Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia regions, has seen the war’s first mass employment of cheap, mid-range drones. Fuel trucks have been the top-priority target, followed by Russian ground-force convoys.Reports of vehicles hit since late June range between 500 and 1,500 18-wheelers, including at least three attacks hitting truck parks and burning a claimed 30+ vehicles at a time. Kyiv Post could not independently confirm those claimed figures.Russian logistics managers have responded by routing freight traffic on secondary roads, camouflaging fuel trucks as food trucks, and paying drivers up to 300% premiums to risk the Mariupol-Crimea run. Imported food and fuel shortages were reported in Crimea almost immediately, and authorities announced fuel rationing in early July.The USF’ third and final target category – the Crimea power grid – was the last to come under intensive attack, with mass attacks against power transformer stations kicking off in early July and almost daily since then. In the worst-hit Crimea regions, by late July, power had been off for as much as thirteen days and rolling blackouts were in effect across the peninsula.Occupier-controlled media in Crimea, and even Russian-state national media (Rossiya 1, Tuesday), have reported Crimea’s residents are bearing up bravely and are confident the power outages and drone attacks are temporary. A Thursday statement by Ukraine’s USF said the attacks on Crimea would continue “until the Russians leave.”