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(CNN) — The barrage of Russian attacks that pelted Ukraine on Monday pushed every city in the country closer to war than it had been in months.
At least 19 people were killed and dozens injured in the missile strikes, backed by Iranian-made attack drones. Infrastructure was damaged and homes were plunged into a power outage ahead of the winter. However, Ukrainian officials said about half of the 84 missiles were intercepted. Russian commentators even suggested that 150 had been launched, suggesting the damage could have been worse.
It was a different level of strength on the part of Moscow, but perhaps not a radical shift in strategy, for two reasons.
First, they are unlikely to withstand such bombardment indefinitely. They have been firing missiles at targets across Ukraine week after week, which will have affected stockpiles. It’s not clear how many drones they received from Iran, but that too is limited and a reflection of depleted stocks, not surplus. Monday was perhaps more an expression of military might than a long-term change in tactics.
It’s important to remember that Moscow had absolutely no qualms about attacking civilian targets or infrastructure since the beginning of the war. In the week leading up to Monday’s attacks, the city of Zaporizhia was repeatedly hit by rockets that slammed into apartment blocks, killing and wounding dozens. At the beginning of the war, a maternity hospital and a theater converted into a bunker with the inscription “CHILDREN” were hit in Mariupol. Monday was not a sudden shift in Russia’s moral compass. They just did what they did on a larger and broader scale during the war.
Second, it didn’t really work. Measured by the amount of cruise missiles consumed, the damage to Ukraine’s infrastructure was far from catastrophic. Kyiv witnessed gruesome scenes of crowded rush-hour streets, along with playgrounds and city parks, and terror it had not seen in months. The net effect of the day Ukrainians hid in bomb shelters was some damage to energy infrastructure and loss of civilian life, but also a promise from the White House to deliver the advanced air defenses Kyiv has been asking for for months.
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At a site we visited in Dnipro, where two expensive cruise missiles struck an abandoned telecommunications building and a civilian bus, causing a huge crater, the road was already paved Tuesday morning, according to footage posted by locals. Even the damage wasn’t permanent.
So what is it about? The message Moscow was sending to Ukraine was not much of a change from the previous seven months of slaughter. He extended the war to Ukrainian cities that had felt safer. But he again united Ukraine’s allies and strengthened the air defenses that Kyiv needs.
The message he sent was probably only successful in one direction: nationally. Putin has been under intense pressure and endured rare open dissent and criticism of the conduct of the war in the weeks since the disastrous implementation of a partial mobilization that suddenly drew tens of thousands of additional Russian families to war. His troops are retreating on three separate fronts, unable to resupply and at greater risk after the Kerch bridge from the mainland to Crimea proved extremely vulnerable. The calls to “do something” had become deafening.
And after three hours of sheer terror in Ukraine, “something” happened. Critics shocked by talks about the war, like Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, were suddenly pleased with the way the war was going. Kremlin spokesmen celebrated the attacks on social media. It was ugly, but they felt they had finally instilled a fear Moscow had been unable to conjure up for weeks. Fear is an integral part of Russia’s military strategy, which has made its cumbersome, inexpensive military seem almost omnipotent for the past decade. Without them, they must contend with poor fuel supplies, frightened frontline recruits, and a lack of effective strategy.
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But will it work again or become part of their regular tactics? Probably not. Ukraine’s air defenses appeared to be doing a good job of intercepting more Russian missiles on Tuesday. Western aid is likely to improve this effectiveness in the coming weeks. Russia wasn’t able to hit the target with great precision, sometimes missing or not really knowing what it was hitting, as we’ve seen before.
The impact of the attacks on the Russian government’s national audience is also likely to be short-lived. They are still losing territory and soldiers at the front. They still can’t properly equip those who forced them to fight. These are issues that will be felt in more and more Russian households shortly after the brief moment of brutal power bestowed by these attacks is over.
The bombing marks a sharp and brutal change of tone for Russia’s new commander Sergei Surovikin, a man whose career has been shaped by the indiscriminate bombing of Syrian civilians and Russia’s brutal second Chechen war. Perhaps it is a moment of punctuation in a long chapter of failure, or simply to herald its arrival.
However, Russia is unlikely to have the Monday scare to replicate it, or the intelligence to make it as effective as it is expensive. It offers a frightening but much-needed moment of calm for a Kremlin that has been dictating the war narrative to Ukraine for weeks. It’s a sign of desperation anyway.
And even in his announcement, Putin’s threats were less harsh: he said future attacks would be met with a response commensurate with the threat to Russia. There were fewer atomic bombs and no promise to continue the attack anyway. Even in his brief moment of imposing terror on Ukraine, Putin was speaking from a position of increasing weakness, this time with dozens fewer cruise missiles in his arsenal.