Ukraine continues to reel from Russia’s missile strike on Monday, which ranks as the largest attack since the start of the war, as Moscow is beginning to suggest that Ukraine could make desperate moves.
“Russia’s large-scale strikes on Ukraine’s critical infrastructure on Monday are almost certainly in response to Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk Oblast, breaching Russia’s border,” Rebekah Koffler, told Fox News Digital.
“Zelenskyy likely anticipated Russia’s retaliation and accepted the risk anyway,” Koffler explained. “Zelenskyy wants to stay in the fight – there’s no other path for him personally or professionally.”
“To stay in the fight, he needs more weapons and financing from the West,” she added. “Zelenskyy likely seeks from the Biden Administration the removal of restrictions for the employment of U.S.-provided weapons, so Ukrainian forces can strike targets deeper inside Russia that are currently within range.”
ON UKRAINIAN INDEPENDENCE DAY, OVER 100 POWS SWAPPED WITH RUSSIA
On Monday, Russia launched 100 missiles and 100 drones as Ukraine continued its incursion into the Kursk region, which marked the first land invasion of Russia since World War II and the most significant setback for Russian President Vladimir Putin since his troops invaded Ukraine. The strikes knocked out key energy infrastructure in 15 regions across the country, killed five people and injured many others, French outlet Le Monde reported.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy claimed on his Telegram channel that Western allies had effectively hamstrung Ukraine with restrictions on weapon use, arguing that “We could do much more to protect lives if the air forces of our European neighbors worked together with our F-16 [fighters] and anti-aircraft defenses.”
Russia followed up that massive strike with a second volley overnight Monday, which killed at least two people as missiles and drones rained down across the Zaporizhzhia region in the southeast, the BBC reported. Ukraine used newly-deployed F16s to help shoot down five missiles and 60 drones, limiting the second strike’s impact to a couple dozen projectiles overall.
President Biden blasted Russia for the “outrageous” attacks and promised to support Ukraine’s energy grid. British Foreign Secretary David Lammy ridiculed Russia for “cowardly missile and drone attacks on civilian infrastructure.”
Ukraine has started compiling a list of long-range targets to hit should Western allies agree to Zelenskyy’s request and lift restrictions on defensive strike capabilities.
The Kursk invasion, which continues to take Moscow by surprise, aimed to divert attention away from other areas – specifically the Pokrovsk and Kurakhove sectors, according to Reuters.
Ukrainian General Oleksandr Syrskyi in remarks broadcast on television argued that Russia had tried to disrupt Ukraine’s supply lines going into those two areas, but that following the Kursk invasion, Moscow had to redeploy around 30,000 servicemen to the Kursk front “and this figure is growing.”
Syrskyi also reported that Ukraine had captured 594 Russian servicemen during the Kursk operation along with 100 settlements, and he claimed that Ukraine had rebuffed Russia’s efforts to counterattack their push.
Koffler advised, however, that as significant as Ukraine’s effort has proven, it remains a double-edged sword that could end up hurting Kyiv in the long-run, with Russia looking to calibrate attacks to keep them “below the threshold of U.S./NATO deploying forces into the theater.”
“While Kyiv was trying to stretch the Russian forces, it stretched its own also,” Koffler explained. “And the manpower ratio overwhelmingly favors Russia and in the war of attrition.”
“Putin, on the other hand, seeks to deter Ukraine from future strikes on Russia and to compel the West to stop assisting Kyiv,” she suggested. “His objective is not a decisive military victory but the degradation of Ukraine’s defensive and industrial capacity, to make it useless for NATO and the West.”
“Putin would rather end this war sooner rather than later, but only on his terms,” she said. “The key question now is whether the Biden-Harris Administration will change policy, allowing Ukraine to be more aggressive in eroding Russia’s red lines.”
Peace efforts continue to prove distant, but various world leaders have tried their hand at seeking a deal between Russia and Ukraine to bring the conflict to a close: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, in his first week as the rotating chair of the European Union, immediately visited both Zelenskyy and Putin to seek a path forward for peace.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the past week took a run at finding a peace deal, visiting Zelenskyy over the weekend before speaking with President Biden on Monday and with Putin on Tuesday.
Modi, who reached Kyiv via train from Poland, stressed to Zelenskyy that “both sides will have to sit together and to look for ways to come out of this crisis,” the BBC reported. Zelenskyy had expressed displeasure two months ago when Modi was photographed embracing Putin during a face-to-face meeting.
Modi circled back to Putin after both Ukraine and U.S. talks, speaking with his Russian counterpart over the phone on Tuesday. A readout of the call did not mention what the two leaders discussed.
Fox News Digital’s Caitlin McFall and Reuters contributed to this report.
