By Tom Fowdy
Over the past couple of days, Russia has dramatically increased its rhetorical threats towards Ukraine in the ongoing war, which is now in its fourth war. Talks towards ending the war have not come to any fruition, precisely because neither party finds it politically convenient to do so. Now, following a spate of Ukrainian drone attacks aimed at Moscow, the Kremlin has launched massive drone and missile attacks at Kyiv and pledged more, publicly urging foreign diplomats to leave. Foreign media, including the BBC and Al-Jazeera, have framed the Kremlin's rhetoric as desperate, arguing that Russia is losing the initiative.
However, what can be discerned is that Russia, four years on from its invasion in 2022, has still failed to achieve its strategic objectives in seeking to subjugate Ukraine to its own preferences and thus force an outcome benefiting its own national interests. Moscow has not been able to deliver a militarily crippling blow to Kyiv, dismantle its resistance, or, even with Trump's ambiguity, dissuade Western countries from supporting it. This has produced a longstanding war of attrition and a largely stagnant frontline.
In the meanwhile, Ukraine, buffered from essentially unlimited western financial support, has managed to vastly expand its drone warfare, including on the battlefield and as well as striking targets in Russia, which has become an Achilles heel for the Kremlin. Thus, as of 2026, and given Trump has continued to quietly aid Ukraine (in contrast to Biden's vocal grandstanding approach) and his attempts to give favourable compromises to Moscow have been met with resistance, Vladimir Putin increasingly feels he does not have a way out of the war he started.
If Russia were to initiate a permanent ceasefire now, the end product would be a western armed and aligned Ukraine which would continue to be a hostile force on its border, thus falling short of the immediate goals for invading the country in the first place. This puts Putin in an uncomfortable position, because he has always premised the "special military operation" on the political convenience that Russia can prevail against Kyiv by fighting "half a war" and not compromise the country's standards of living or core middle-class population in its western regions through unnecessary escalation.
However, as the war continues to roll on without an end in sight, and Ukraine's abilities to hit Russia's cities increase, the political embarrassment from Putin's miscalculations is growing, and Putin may no longer have such a "best of both worlds" privilege. This has led to the claim that Ukraine struck a "dormitory" and killed twenty-one people. Now, this fact is contested, and it is also lost in a sea of propaganda from both sides. Regardless of what the truth is, though, one should pay attention to the messaging that the Kremlin has chosen to amplify such an apparent loss as opposed to playing it down. After all, many bad things in Russia happen that you don't hear about it, so why this? The answer is because it justifies a premise of escalation.
And why might, besides these difficulties, Russia escalate now? First of all, Donald Trump is distracted. The war in Ukraine has become an afterthought for the President as he is also wrapped up in a self-made war that has gone wrong, Iran, and on top of that, clearly has his eyes on a regime change of sorts in Cuba. The White House does not have the bandwidth to interfere in Ukraine when Iran has already caused havoc on global energy markets, which has reduced the leveraged of allied countries to sanction Russia. Secondly, Putin has just visited China. For the Russian President to visit Beijing is a clear sign of continued Chinese strategic backing, and Putin has shown a diplomatic pattern of behaviour whereby he will visit China and then proceed on radical action in Ukraine.
Thus, if there is a moment for Russia to escalate the war in Ukraine, it is now. During the Biden years, the US was always prepared to raise the stakes in response to Russia's actions, which made the conflict a diplomatic balancing act, but Trump even if quietly supplying Ukraine, constitutes no such equilibrium. Russia has so far failed to deliver a knockout blow, and the war is becoming more and more of a political liability the further it goes on. So thus, the Kremlin has set up a propaganda premise in order to dramatically escalate attacks on Kyiv, but given Ukraine seems to have endured everything Russia has thrown at it so far, albeit with a lot of propaganda and coverups from the western media, it remains to be seen just how far Moscow will go to try and overwhelm a country, it has so far failed to underwhelm.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.
Read more articles by Tom Fowdy:
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