It may be time for the European allies to rethink their current policy on Ukrainian attacks in Russia

I posted earlier this month about Sergei Karaganov, a prominent Russian foreign policy intellectual who is reportedly taken serious by senior Russian authorities. He has been suggesting that the Russian government may need to send stronger signals to the European allies of Ukraine that there are limits to the attacks Moscow will tolerate on Russian territory.

John Mearsheimer spoke about these concerns recently in an interview. (1)

There are two broad areas of concern with the attacks inside Russia, both with drones and Ukrainian troops. They make for dramatic headlines, like this one from this past Monday: (2)

There was also a ground offensive of 2024-2025 into the Kursk area of Russian territory whose benefit for the Ukrainian war effort was always highly doubtful. And it ended with Ukrainian withdrawal:

Ukrainian soldiers fighting in Russia's Kursk region have described scenes "like a horror movie" as they retreated from the front lines.

The BBC has received extensive accounts from Ukrainian troops, who recount a "catastrophic" withdrawal in the face of heavy fire, and columns of military equipment destroyed and constant attacks from swarms of Russian drones.

The soldiers, who spoke over social media, were given aliases to protect their identity. Some gave accounts of a "collapse" as Ukraine lost Sudzha, the largest town it held. (3)

That incursion provided some morale-boosting headlines for a few weeks. But it didn’t provide any obvious significant military advantage. And Ukraine, which has a far smaller pool of potential soldiers than Russia, took losses in that chapter of the war. As the BBC report cited above commented, “Western officials estimate that Ukraine's Kursk offensive involved about 12,000 troops. They were some of their best-trained soldiers, equipped with Western-supplied weapons including tanks and armoured vehicles.” The Russians drove the Ukrainian forces out in 2025.

The German Tagesschau news service reported in late 2025 on the results of the operation: „For the first time since World War II, a foreign army stood on Russian territory. For Ukraine, it was the first significant offensive in a long time in the war against Russia.” (4)

There’s no question that its perfectly legitimate in terms of the laws of war and the normal practice of it for Ukraine to attack targets in Russia. Russia occupied and illegally annexed the Ukrainian province of Crimea in 2014. For years, they provided support, including some Russia soldiers, to pro-Russian secessionist forces in eastern Ukraine, particularly the Donetsk and Luhansk provinces. And in 2022, Russia launched a full-on invasion of eastern Ukraine which continues with on-going combat today. The were illegal acts of aggression by Russia and Ukraine is still at war with Russia. So there’s no question that Ukraine can legitimately attack inside Russian territory.

How effective or advisable the attacks have been is another question.

Hitting the Russian “nuclear triad”

The Russians, like the US and other countries, have nuclear missiles based on the ground, on submarines based, and on planes. If – or rather, when – nuclear powers develop nuclear-attack drones, those would presumably be part of the aerial branch of the triad. (5)

Mearsheimer has been particularly critical of the June 1, 2025 Operation Spiderweb in which Ukrainian drones attacked several Russian airfields. An early analysis found:

The exact losses sustained by the Russian Aerospace Forces as a result of the Ukrainian drone attack have yet to be established, but they include at least seven Tu-95MS heavy strategic bombers, which are capable of carrying nuclear weapons. Several Tu-22M3 long-range bombers and at least one A-50 airborne early warning and control aircraft were also destroyed. According to the Financial Times, the drones destroyed or damaged about 20 percent of Russia’s operationally ready long-range aviation.

Russia currently produces one strategic bomber per year, so it will take at least seven years to make up for the losses. The Tu-95MSs and Tu-22M3s were designed back in the Soviet era and are no longer in production, so as a carrier of cruise missiles, their destruction is a major blow to Russian long-range aviation. The loss of the A-50, meanwhile, will reduce the effectiveness of fighter and strike aircraft.

Operation Spiderweb was also a serious blow to Russia’s image. Strategic bombers, which only the United States, Russia, and China have in service, are a symbol of power and an important instrument for projecting force. It’s no coincidence that Russia resumed flights by strategic bombers back in 2007 in various regions of the world, including over neutral waters close to NATO countries.

Most importantly of all, the operation was an attack on one of the official elements of the nuclear triad: strategic aviation, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and nuclear submarines. Nuclear weapons are the main symbol of Russia’s global greatness. Accordingly, Operation Spiderweb was undoubtedly a blow to the Kremlin’s pride. [my emphasis] (6)

Mearsheimer has stressed repeatedly that attacks on elements of the nuclear triad like this had been considered strictly taboo before then in the long-standing nuclear balance of terror. And the fact that the Russian triad was attacked and even seriously damaged by Ukraine that is actively being supplied and supported by Western countries, including the US, was a particularly risky move that could lead Russian strategists to conclude that their own nuclear deterrence capacity is insufficient.

I’m convinced he’s right on that issue. The Western allies should insist that Ukraine stay away from any such attacks like that on the Russian nuclear triad. We still live in very much a world of nuclear bombs and as of now, we have no international arms control treaties still in effect.

“Strategic” and “tactical” bombing

Since the early years of bombing from planes, there has been a conventional distinction among Western powers between “tactical” and “strategic” bombing strategies. Tactical air power means aerial support for operations by land and sea forces. Strategic air power means targeting sites and structures that support the war enemy’s war effort, such as munitions factories, transportation hubs, and energy supplies. Strategic air power has also been used with the goal of undermining the civilian morale on the enemy side, a goal that we see being applied in the current US-Israeli War on Iran. And the results of using bombing to destroy the enemy civilians’ morale and provoking them to overthrow their own governments continues the remarkable record of failure it has consistently had since the First World War. (7)

Ukraine and Russia have both been employing strategic bombing against military facilities and military-related infrastructure of the other side. Those attacks are also legitimate for Ukraine to use against Russia. But given the concentration of the war since 2022 on Ukraine’s eastern oblasts (provinces of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia), and given the far greater resources in manpower and industrial capacity Russia has over Ukraine, it would seem that the value of focusing attacks on those four occupied provinces would be a more effective use of Ukrainian military resources that attacks on “strategic” targets deeper inside Russia. It may well be that some of those deeper strategic attacks have been effective in reducing some of Russia’s warmaking capacity.

And that effective usage may well include some of targets struck in Moscow and its vicinity. But if Ukraine’s strategists are expected such attacks to destroy the enemy population’s morale, they are almost surely going to be disappointed.

Scott Lucas is another political analyst who does solid evaluations of Donald Trump and some of the current war issues. Including in this current podcast. (8) But he does seem tempted to overestimate the possible damage to public morale that Russia may been experiencing right now. I suspect that the devout neocon belief that the war that the USSR had in Afghanistan was what brought down the Soviet Union is still having an outsized effect on the thinker of many about this. (Despite that belief having only a dim relation to the actual history.)

But he’s also cautious about predict immediate shifts in the military position of the two sides in eastern Ukraine. What we’re seeing there right now is a lot like a frozen conflict but with no armistice agreement to go with it.

Notes:

(1) John Mearsheimer: Toward All-Out War With Both Russia & Iran. Glenn Diesen YouTube channel 05/18/2026. <https://youtu.be/Dx7osj5gCmo?si=8abfvzD2pjzazY-h> (Accessed: 2026-18-05).

(2) Melkozerova, Veronika (2026): Ukraine breaches Russia’s strongest air defenses to hit Moscow. Politico EU 05/18/2026. <https://www.politico.eu/article/ukraine-breaches-russia-strongest-air-defenses-drone-attack-hits-moscow/> (Accessed: 2026-18-05).

(3) Beale, Jonathan & Levchenko, Anastasiia (2025): 'Everything is finished': Ukrainian troops relive retreat from Kursk. BBC News 03/17/2025 <https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0q198zyppqo> (Accessed: 2026-20-05).

(4) Was von Kursk geblieben ist. Tagesschau 08/11/2025. <https://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/europa/ein-jahr-kursk-ukraine-russland-100.html> (Accessed: 2025-20-05). My translation from German.

(5) Serim, Esra (2025): Drone technology and the future of nuclear weapons. The Loop (from the European Consortium for Political Research [ECPR] 07/23/2025. <https://theloop.ecpr.eu/advancing-drone-technology-and-the-future-of-nuclear-weapons/> (Accessed: 2025-20-05).

(6) Starchak, Maxim (2025): Ukraine’s Drone Attack on Russia’s Strategic Aviation Has Broader Implications. Carnegie Politika 06/10/2025. <https://carnegieendowment.org/russia-eurasia/politika/2025/06/russia-nuclear-force-shuffle> (Accessed: 2025-20-05).