Ukraine struck Russia’s largest oil refinery, located in the city of Omsk, on Monday, marking what its forces say was its furthest-ever drone attack in the war.
The Omsk facility, which processes about 21 million tons of oil a year, is in Western Siberia and about 1,700 miles from Ukrainian territory — roughly the distance between Los Angeles and Houston.
There’s accusations that they’re mostly kept around Moscow and Putin’s compound, and stay there.
Which is pretty stupid IMO, as I imagine killing Putin is a Pandora’s Box Ukraine does not want to open. And shelling civilians in Moscow is just cruel, and makes no tactical sense in lieu of other targets…
You’re probably right. It’s never wise to make a martyr out of your enemy, and Zelensky is vastly more wise than Putin. And Trump.
Well, Putin is actually a “moderate” of sorts in Russian politics. There are some scary, more nationalist and extremist, figures he keeps in line that would be happy to fill the power vacuum.
It’s not even predicable anymore, as Putin’s already killed the most “obvious” popular ones, like Prigozhin.
That’s what I meant.
Maybe they could kill Putin, without him becoming a martyr. But Ukraine doesn’t know what comes after Putin.
In a country with so many nukes, that could be a literally catastrophic gamble.
That’s a good point. I didn’t know there were hardliners with that much power.
If you’re interested in further reading, ISW sometimes covers this figures in their Ukraine updates.
You might be particularly interested in the nearly successful Wagner rebellion, where a Russian mercenary company drove a convoy to Moscow and almost made it, largely unopposed by the Russian military. Some joined him:
https://www.understandingwar.org/research/russia-ukraine/assessing-prigozhins-wagner-group-rebellion/
Putin was always paranoid, but this is the reason for the extra recent paranoia, FYI.
I remember the Wagner accident and can’t understand why he stopped. He could have literally had a successful coup and then just… Didn’t?
He had at max 25000 people under his personal control (and probably only a fraction of that). An actual full march on Moscow (a city of 13 million people located over 1000 km away) would have been beyond doomed unless a ton of people flipped to him very quickly including the logistics to keep them moving. Maybe it was hoped for but didn’t happen. Also, despite the potential for the Ukraine War to go in a terrible direction for Putin with this distraction from the Ukrainian offensive, at no point did Putin attempt to negotiate giving up Shoigu and Gerasimov (which Prigozhin had hoped for) and in fact he wouldn’t deign to speak to him at all. So he didn’t flip the forces he needed to win and the leverage he had for the alternate goal turned out to be useless.
He COULD have fought anyway but that would be essentially throwing away the lives of him and his men, bringing bloody civil war to Russia to no benefit, damaging the “special military operation” they had fought in, and probably end terribly for their extended families also… not a great legacy for nationalist types. So the option to surrender and set up shop in Belarus, while not likely to end well for Prigozhin, was at least a chance rather than certain death. And much better results for the other issues.
Yeah that’s always been a mystery to me too.