If you expected things to come to a grinding halt for a few months as winter takes hold in Ukraine and Russia, it looks as if you may need to think again. Military analysts are confidently predicting that Ukraine will intensify its counteroffensive in the south to drive through Russian forces and isolate Crimea ahead of a possible attempt to regain the territory it lost in 2014.

Now the commander of Ukraine’s armed forces, General Valeriy Zaluzhny, has said he believes Russia may be gearing up for a fresh attempt at Kyiv, after its failure to take Ukraine’s capital in the early months of the invasion. “The Russians are preparing some 200,000 fresh troops. I have no doubt they will have another go at Kyiv,” he said in an interview with The Economist.

Meanwhile Ukrainian drones have continued to strike at military targets within Russia itself. In recent days a Russian airbase in Kursk, about 280 miles south of Moscow and well inside it’s border with Ukraine.

Last week Ukrainian drones struck air bases in the Saratov and Ryazan oblasts, both hundreds of miles inside Russia as well as destroying an oil storage facility near Kursk airbase. Ukraine has been careful not to claim responsibility for these strikes, preferring to maintain ambiguity over who is responsible for these attacks on sovereign Russian soil, which might prompt Russia to escalate dramatically.

Stefan Wolff, an expert in international security at the University of Birmingham, runs us through the likely outcomes of Ukraine taking the war into Russian soil using drones. He doesn’t believe drones alone can materially affect the result of the war, but writes that the attacks hand Kyiv a significant morale booster while showing the Russian people that Ukraine has the ability to strike back at them. He also notes the interesting position taken by Washington, which insists it “neither enabled nor encouraged” the attacks, but is reported to have tacitly approved the strikes.

 

While we’re on the subject of drones, here’s an authoritative take on both sides’ use of the weapons from earlier in the conflict, by Brendan Walker-Munro of the University of Queensland, whose research has focused on the use of autonomous weapons and unmanned vehicles in war. Walker-Munro reminds us that in 2017, Vladimir Putin said of drones that “the one who becomes the leader in this sphere will be the ruler of the world”.

Ukraine is clearly keen to let Putin know that they, too, have drones and know how to use them.