Why Russia's Bombing of Kyiv Is Not Breaking Ukraine

Among the most enduring images of WWII are photos of Londoners enduring the Blitz on subway platforms. Post-war analyses reveal that bombing of civilians in the UK, Germany and Japan tended to harden attitudes, not weaken them. The same occurred in US bombing of Vietnam.

As Russia's failures on the battlefield are compounded by rising casualties and declining advances, the Kremlin's targeting of civilians is also having an effect the reverse of that intended. In part, because of innate human stubbornness and resentment of bullying, but also because Russia does not have the resources to effectively bomb into submission a country the size of Ukraine. JL

Bogdan Maftei reports in The Erudite Elders:

Russia is elevating attacks on civilians into the central strategy of the war. The intent is to drag the eyes of the world onto these strikes and divert them from its failure in over four years of fighting. Ukraine is now taking more ground than Russia as the Kremlin's forces absorb the highest casualty rates of the war for a shrinking return. And, Ukraine is hitting Russia's economy at scale. Moscow cannot win this war in the conventional sense. Russia wants the world to read its fury as strength. The honest reading is the reverse. Bombing civilians failed in Britain, Germany and Japan in WWII, and in Vietnam. In a country the size of Ukraine, on an average day, more people are killed in road accidents than by Russian bombs.  When a power resorting to a military strategy that has never once succeeded, at the very moment its every other effort is breaking down, you are looking at a country lashing out to grab whatever it can before the window closes. 

Moscow’s approach has shifted and it is not a small thing. For most of this war the story was the front line, the slow churn of trenches and treelines in the east and south, the meter-by-meter arithmetic of attrition. That story has not disappeared, but it has been crowded out by a different one. The war has moved into the night sky over Ukraine’s cities, and above all over Kyiv. Russia is hammering civilian targets with a regularity and a scale that sets this phase apart from everything that came before it.

None of this is new in kind. Russia has been striking Ukrainian civilian targets since more or less the first day of the invasion, so a burning apartment block in Kyiv is not, by itself, a fresh development. What is new is the scale and the consistency, and the sheer volume of resources Moscow is now willing to pour into these strikes. We have not seen this before. Russia appears to be elevating attacks on civilians from a side activity into the central strategy of the entire war, and the last couple of weeks have made that unmistakable.

Take the night of May 24, which currently stands as the single largest attack of the war measured by the civilian infrastructure actually damaged. On that night alone Russia sent hundreds of drones along with missiles, and the estimated cost of that one strike, a single night’s work, runs to around 400 million dollars. That is a staggering figure for any military, and a particularly telling one for a country that is supposed to be husbanding its resources for a long war. You do not spend like that to achieve a military objective on the battlefield. You spend like that to send a message. And it was not a one-off. The nights leading up to May 24 were near record-breakers in their own right, with Russia launching hundreds of drones and missiles at a time, on some nights more than a thousand.

Moscow has also tried to choreograph the fear around these strikes. In the run-up, Russian officials reached out to foreign ambassadors and envoys stationed in Ukraine and told them, in so many words, to get out of the city because something enormous was coming. It was theater dressed up as a warning, an attempt to manufacture a spectacle the world’s media could not ignore. To their credit, most of those diplomats declined to take the bait and stayed put, which meant Russia was largely unable to follow through on the implied threat. But the intent was obvious: drag the eyes of the world onto these strikes and extract from them something Moscow has failed to extract from three years of fighting. As I write this, with nightfall approaching in Ukraine, President Zelensky has again warned that a massive Russian attack is expected tonight. The pattern is hardening.

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To understand why Russia is leaning so heavily into this, look at what has happened on the ground, because the two are connected. The front has turned against Moscow. Russia has not been able to take significant territory from Ukraine lately, and I do not mean it has merely slowed down. Even the grinding, glacial progress that observers had grudgingly come to expect, advances that were never fast enough to matter strategically, has largely dried up. Several things have driven this. Ukraine has pushed forward with its drone technology and now fields capabilities it did not have a year ago. It also exploited a window of breathing room when Russian access to Starlink was cut off, using that relief from pressure to expand its own offensive operations. The result is that Ukraine is now conducting limited counter-offensives and, in places, taking back more ground than Russia is managing to seize. Russian forces, meanwhile, are absorbing some of the highest casualty rates of the entire war for that shrinking return.

At the same time, Ukraine has started reaching Russian logistics in a way it could not before, hitting supply lines at a scale and intensity that is new. Those strikes are steadily cutting the occupied territories off from resupply, Crimea included. Put all of this together and the picture for Russia is bleak. There is a real possibility that Moscow simply cannot win this war in the conventional sense it set out to win it, by defeating the Ukrainian army in the field and dictating terms. And so Russia has reached for something else: an attempt to win the war through air power alone.

It is worth pausing on how significant that pivot is. Russia’s established way of war, the strategy of human-wave assaults and grinding attrition, is brutal and wasteful, but it is not stupid, and it is not unprecedented. Going into the Ukraine war it was, for Russia, a proven method with history on its side. The clearest example is the Second World War, when the Soviet Union ultimately destroyed the German invader, at a staggering human cost, by throwing so many bodies at the problem that it eventually overwhelmed the enemy. That approach has worked for Russia before. What Moscow is now doing is stepping away from a strategy with a track record of success and substituting one that has, historically, never worked. That is not a sign of confidence. It is the move of a power that has run out of good options.

The logic behind the air campaign is not hard to reconstruct, and Russia is not being especially subtle about it. Having discovered that it cannot defeat the Ukrainian military on the battlefield, Moscow is trying to defeat the average Ukrainian civilian at home instead. The theory is that if you apply enough pressure, enough fear and grief and disruption to ordinary life, a democratic society will eventually exhaust itself and pressure its own government into accepting a peace deal on terms Russia finds acceptable. You do not have to guess at this. It lines up neatly with everything Russia has done on the information front throughout the war, the propaganda aimed both at Ukrainians and at the foreign publics whose governments are arming Ukraine. It lines up with the carefully seeded narrative around each round of so-called peace talks, the steady drumbeat insisting the war is unwinnable for Ukraine so that Kyiv might as well hand Moscow what it wants.

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Above all, it lines up with the targets Russia is choosing. Its long-range strikes are overwhelmingly not aimed at military objectives. They are aimed at civilian ones: schools, apartment buildings, cultural landmarks, the things a society grieves to lose, the things that seize the emotional attention of ordinary people and plant the question, why are we still doing this. Notice the contrast with what Ukraine is doing to Russia. Ukraine is going after factories, war production, the assets that generate Russian military power, the way you fight an enemy you intend to beat. Russia, at least at anything like the same scale, is not. It is hunting for headlines and heartbreak.

And this is where the strategy falls apart, because it is not really a strategy at all. It is a country lashing out in desperation. There was perhaps a time, before we had the historical record we now possess, when you could have argued this approach might work. We no longer have that excuse. We have accumulated more than enough evidence from previous wars to say, with some confidence, that what Russia is attempting will not deliver what Moscow wants.

The Second World War is again the sharpest illustration, because both sides tried exactly this. The shared assumption was that if you firebombed the enemy’s cities into rubble, the surviving civilians would be so broken that they would withdraw their support for the war and the whole thing would collapse from within. This was, in particular, Germany’s bet against the United Kingdom. Berlin viewed Britain as a country that had entered the war by choice and could just as easily step back from it, safe behind the moat of the English Channel, since Hitler had already concluded that invading the British Isles was effectively impossible. Break the will of the British public, the thinking went, and Germany could carry on uncontested. The reality ran in precisely the opposite direction. The bombing destroyed tens of thousands of buildings, left millions homeless, and killed tens of thousands of civilians, a scale of devastation far beyond anything Ukraine is suffering today. And still the British did not fold. Neither, when the bombing was turned on them, did the Germans or the Japanese.

If populations endured all of that without surrendering, it is fanciful to imagine that Ukrainians will buckle under pressure that is, by comparison, considerably lighter. None of this is meant to wave away Ukrainian suffering, least of all for the individuals who have lost someone, and at this stage most Ukrainians probably have lost someone they knew. But there is a difference between personal grief, however profound, and the kind of civilizational shock that would actually push an entire nation to capitulate.

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Consider it this way. In a country the size of Ukraine, on an average day, and certainly year over year, more people are killed in road accidents than by Russian bombs. That is not an argument for shrugging off the bombs. Every one of those deaths, whether from a missile or a car crash, is a tragedy, and every casualty Russia inflicts is unnecessary by definition. But notice that a country the size of Ukraine does not respond to its road toll by banning cars. By the same logic, a country that has already been fighting Russia for years is not going to throw in the towel and accept Moscow’s demands over what amounts, in the cold scale of national survival, to a manageable level of pain.

The historical examples do not stop at the Second World War. You can run the same exercise through Korea and Vietnam, where populations were subjected to overwhelming air power, pulverized by any conventional measure, and did not capitulate. If anything they were galvanized by the destruction around them, more determined to keep fighting precisely because the enemy was willing to inflict such senseless ruin. Why, from their point of view, would you ever surrender to that. The psychological effect Russia is reaching for has a strong historical tendency to produce its exact opposite.

And in Ukraine’s case the polling bears that out. Yes, you can find surveys showing that something like 69 or 70 percent of Ukrainians want the war to stop and would like to negotiate an end to it with Russia, and Moscow happily waves those numbers around as proof that the pressure is working. But the same polling tells a different story underneath. Around 75 percent of Ukrainians, while wanting a negotiated peace, regard Russia’s terms as completely unacceptable. Drill down further and roughly 90 percent say they cannot accept any peace that leaves Russia holding the territory it has seized since 2022. The bombing has not made Ukrainians want to surrender. It has made them want the war to be over, which is what any sane person whose neighborhood is being blown apart would want. Britons wanted the Blitz to end too. Wanting the war over is not the same as wanting to lose it, and beneath the exhaustion you can see in Ukrainians a hardening resolve to defeat the people doing this to them.

There is a further problem for Moscow, which is that the strikes are not even especially effective. The hits that get through and dominate the news are real, but they are always a small fraction of the force Russia launches on any given night. To land a handful of damaging, headline-generating blows, Moscow has to commit enormous quantities of drones and missiles simply to swamp Ukrainian air defenses for a few hours. That is an expensive way to buy a photograph of a burning building.

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Ukraine’s side of this equation, by contrast, improves a little every day. Its air defenses keep getting better, with new tactics and new tools coming online. Much has been made publicly of Ukraine running short of Patriot interceptors, but the less advertised reality is that Ukraine has not run out, and there is a reason for that. Patriots are needed only for particular targets, chiefly ballistic missiles, and for the most part Ukraine has managed to stop those weapons from ever leaving the ground, by striking deep inside Russia at the factories that build them. It is therefore rare for Russia to generate the kind of munitions that could exploit the genuine gaps Ukraine still has in its air defense. Ukraine, in other words, has been using a highly effective and steadily improving offense as a form of defense. And it is now working on fielding its own homegrown alternative to the Patriot.

The takeaway is this. As grim as the past stretch has been for Ukraine, and it has not come anywhere close to pushing the country toward capitulation or even serious thoughts of it, the trajectory points toward things getting better for Kyiv over time, not worse. You may not see that in the immediate moment, because right now Russia is lashing out with these huge, expensive barrages. But that is precisely what Russia does when it is desperate and casting about for some way to wrench the momentum back in its favor.

So here is the framing that matters. Russia wants Ukraine, and the wider world watching alongside it, to read all this fury as strength and resolve. The honest reading is the reverse. When you see a power resorting to a military strategy that has never once succeeded, at the very moment its every other line of effort is breaking down across the board, you are not looking at confidence. You are looking at a country lashing out to grab whatever it can before the window closes. Ukraine has fought this long and this hard, and in my view it has every reason to keep fighting and to keep its nerve, denying Russia the victory it is trying to win by, quite literally, killing Ukrainian children. Looked at squarely, there is no reason for Ukraine to stop. And that is exactly why information, and the framing of information, matters so much. Read the headlines without context and Russia’s air campaign looks like an ascendant power tightening the screws. Read them with a little history and common sense, and you see something close to the opposite: the loud, costly thrashing of a strategy that is already, almost certainly, doomed.