30/05/2023
There’s no way for anyone to put a positive spin on what just happened. Only those comparatively few Western radicals driven by bloodlust consider Kiev’s latest terrorist attack to be a positive development worth applauding. All decent people the world over are revolted by what it just did.
Ukraine is so desperate to deflect attention from its loss of Artyomovsk that it just carried out a drone strike against two Moscow apartment buildings. The physical damage was minimal, but this fascist regime apparently targeted residential structures in the Russian capital for psychological purposes. They failed to provoke widespread panic, however, since everything remains normal. Nevertheless, by attacking apartment buildings, Kiev vindicated Russia’s claim that it commits terrorism.
The sequence of events was entirely predictable: Kiev dispatches some drones to attack residential structures in Moscow; most get shot down while two get through to their targets; then Russia reminds everyone that its opponent is a state sponsor of terrorism. The obviousness of how everything played out makes one wonder why this particular attack was approved in the first place. After all, it would have been more effective for them to stage another proxy incursion across Russia’s pre-2014 border.
This insight suggests that Kiev’s decisionmakers are losing their cool under pressure from the US to go through with their NATO-backed counteroffensive despite the low odds of it meeting expectations. Nothing else explains why they’d greenlight this self-discrediting attack against Moscow apartment buildings. It handed Russia a soft power victory and will also contribute to further consolidating that country’s society exactly as every one of this fascist regime’s prior terrorist attacks have done.
No calm and confident actor resorts to terrorism, which is always committed from a position of weakness by the side that can’t match its opponent’s conventional strength. Considering this, it can be intuited that Kiev is well aware of how unlikely it is that its much-hyped counteroffensive will succeed in breaking Russia’s formidable defenses absent some black swan event. Since it doesn’t predict many on-the-ground gains, if any, it’s instead trying to achieve some psychological and soft power ones instead.
Kiev’s recent proxy incursion across Russia’s pre-2014 border and Tuesday morning’s drone strike against Moscow apartment buildings thus make a little bit more sense. They both failed to provoke widespread panic in Russia, but they nevertheless succeeded in capturing the international headlines. The first psychological goal could have had some tangible impact on Russia’s political stability if anything came of these two incidents, while the second soft power one might only result in misleading more Westerners.
That latter goal is actually counterproductive though since it keeps pro-Kiev supporters’ hopes of their side’s supposedly inevitable “ultimate victory” unrealistically high, after which they risk being deeply disappointed should the NATO-Russian proxy war end with some sort of compromise. Politico earlier cited unnamed figures from the Biden Administration who worried about the consequences of that happening, which could lead to a massive loss of morale all across the West.
Not only that, but the most diehard of Kiev’s supporters could become radicalized if they start believing QAnon-like conspiracy theories for explaining this outcome. Garry Kasparov already introduced a ridiculous one into the information ecosystem in early May implying that Russian agents infiltrated the White House, which is supposedly why the US isn’t doing more to help Kiev win. Those who fall for these conspiracy theories could eventually pose domestic threats just like some of QAnon’s supporters.
More Westerners, however, might start wondering why they’re funding a country that attacks their opponent’s residential structures. Many have thus far been indoctrinated into thinking that this is Russia’s modus operandi after Moscow was blamed every time some of Kiev’s faulty air defense missiles accidentally struck their own apartment buildings and playgrounds. Now they might start thinking that Ukraine isn’t all that innocent after it deliberately attacked two of Russia’s residential structures.
There’s no way for anyone to put a positive spin on what just happened. Only those comparatively few radicals driven by bloodlust consider Kiev’s latest terrorist attack to be a positive development worth applauding. All decent people the world over are revolted by what it just did, which discredits Ukraine’s claims of defending itself and not stooping to the level that it falsely claims Russia is already at. There’s now no doubt that Kiev commits terror and just needlessly lost itself even more Western supporters.
Source: the author’s blog
Emma Olive 