In Ukraine, the Russian air campaign affects civilian populations

by time news

Four months of war will have been enough to turn them into banal scenes: an explosion captured by a grainy surveillance camera, swirling flames rising in a blue sky and, the next morning, the smoking desolation of the iron beams twisted and bodies pulled out by firefighters from the charred rubble.

The Russian strike on the commercial center of Kremenchuk, a city of 200,000 people on the banks of the Dnieper, came just a day after Russian missiles hit two apartment buildings in the Ukrainian capital. More than 20 people died in Kremenchuk on June 27 and at least one person died in kyiv, where, after three weeks without attacks, life was gradually returning to normal.

Russian denial

Started at dawn on February 24 with the firing of more than 100 ballistic missiles at military bases scattered all over Ukraine, the Russian army’s “long-distance” strike campaign then decreased in intensity. But without ever completely dying out, and increasingly affecting civilian infrastructure such as the Kremenchouk supermarket.

“From a military point of view, these strikes have no interest, thus judges Jean-Christophe Noël, a former air force officer and associate researcher at the French Institute of International Relations (Ifri). And when there is no military interest, you have to look at the political side. »

While acknowledging the strikes on kyiv and Kremenchuk, the Russian Ministry of Defense assured that it only hit military objectives, asserting in the case of Kremenchuk that “secondary explosions” set fire to a “disused supermarket” (it has since been confirmed that the mall was hit directly by a missile and was not closed) and denying that the strike on kyiv hit any civilian infrastructure.

“A desire to achieve a psychological effect”

The presence of a machinery factory explicitly targeted by the Russian army not far from the supermarket leaves open the possibility of a blunder. But Ukraine has denounced what it sees as a campaign of terror against its population, going so far as to call, through the voice of its President Volodymyr Zelensky, on Western countries to designate Moscow as “State sponsor of terrorism”.

“There is in these attacks a desire to obtain a psychological effect” said Mikhaïlo Samus, a Ukrainian military expert based in kyiv. “It’s obviously very complicated for the population to still be under attack even when you’re in the middle of the country, and if civilian infrastructure like a supermarket can be affected, you never know where the next strike will fall. » he adds.

Not yet enough to bend a determined population, but “enough to poison the lives of the inhabitants, scare away investors and prevent reconstruction”,judge on twitter Israeli historian and political scientist Eugene Finkel.

Inventory issues

But Moscow could also seek to be heard beyond Ukraine. The weekend of June 26, which according to a count by Ukrainian media Forbes saw Russia fire between 60 and 80 long-range missiles across the country, coincided with a busy political sequence, between a G7 meeting in the Bavarian Alps and, a few days later, NATO summit in Madrid.

“The idea of ​​the Russians is probably to remind us that they are there, to thwart the optimistic message of Westerners by bringing back to the reality on the ground and their desire to go all the way, says Jean-Christophe Noël. The second possible explanation is that it is a form of punishment for the influx of Western weapons into Ukraine. »

But if, since the beginning of the war, Russia has never stopped hitting towns several hundred kilometers from the front line, these strikes have remained intermittent. An absence of a large-scale bombing campaign which would be explained by the level of Russian ammunition stocks – one of the best kept secrets of the Kremlin.

A missile designed in the 1950s fired at Kremenchuk

“Russia is already facing a deficit of Kalibr and Iskander”, assumes Mikhaïlo Samus, referring to two of the most advanced long-range missiles in the Russian arsenal. « Their stock of modern weapons will continue to deplete, which is why they avoid firing at deep targets every day,” abounds Jean-Christophe Noël.

It is in fact an ancient Kh-22 missile, fired from Russian territory by a Tupolev bomber, which would have destroyed the commercial center of Kremenchuk. Designed in the 1950s to destroy American aircraft carriers, possibly by installing a nuclear warhead, these missiles “are very imprecise, their deviation could go up to 1 kilometer”, notes Mikhaïlo Samus. Enough to guarantee collateral damage when fired at urban areas.

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