The two-and-a-half years of Russian bombing across Ukraine have claimed thousands of lives, from kyiv to Kharkiv, via Odessa, Lviv and other cities. However, in these 936 days of war, until last Tuesday, never had a Russian civilian been killed by a Ukrainian attack far from the border between the two countries. kyiv has fired successive waves of drones at Russian territory in recent weeks, but only the barrage on September 10 caused a fatality in Moscow. The woman died not in the Russian border town of Belgorod, regularly hit by Ukrainian drones and rockets, but in Ramenskoye, near the capital, in the heart of Russia. That death has recalled the fear, expressed by some military experts, that the contenders will resort to large-scale drone and missile bombings of urban areas, such as Moscow or kyiv, to defeat the enemy at a time of stalemate in the conflict. A strategy whose embodiment in another conflict, the one between Iran and Iran in the eighties, was called War of the cities.
Russian authorities seem to be aware of this possibility. “One of the most powerful air defence systems in the world is deployed around Moscow, which has so far generally stopped attacks,” Russian military analyst Yuri Lyamin told Morning Express. Despite this, Pantsir anti-aircraft defence turrets have been installed on some buildings in the Russian capital, while drone jammers make life and work difficult, especially for taxi drivers, but also for ordinary drivers, by interfering with the signal of GPS navigators.
Several Russian cities announced last week that they would build concrete bunkers in their streets to protect themselves from drones, which have a small explosive charge, although these shelters do not protect against a missile strike. Some of these towns, such as Tomsk and Krasnoyarsk, are about 3,000 kilometres from Ukraine.
An announcement this week by the Penza Emergency Service, 1,500 kilometres from the invaded country, also reflects the fear of an attack on Russian territory with a large number of civilian casualties: “The location of this shelter [el de Penza] “It was not chosen by chance. The banks of the Sura River are a mass gathering point and will save people’s lives in case of threat,” the announcement said.
One of the worst exchanges in terms of civilian casualties between the two sides in the war took place in late 2023. Russia killed at least 58 Ukrainians in a massive bombardment on December 29 with Kinzhal hypersonic missiles. Ukraine attacked Belgorod the next day with drones and Vampire rockets, killing at least 24 people. Russia launched another wave of 90 drones in the early hours of the new year that injured dozens more civilians.
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kyiv has now asked the US and the UK for permission to use its long-range missiles against a list of exclusively military Russian targets, such as command centres and air bases. London and Washington have so far rejected the request, to which Russian President Vladimir Putin has responded by threatening an escalation.
“If we look at wars since the advent of aviation and rockets capable of attacking in depth, this type of offensive [contra ciudades] “have become almost inevitable in the long term in any major conflict,” says analyst Lyamin. In “practice,” he notes, “the logic of war often dictates that it eventually becomes necessary to increase the scale of attacks and expand the list of targets.” The so-called war of the cities The conflict between Iran and Iraq between 1980 and 1988 “is undoubtedly a very good example of this phenomenon.”
Large cities “are often the most important industrial and transport centres, as well as the headquarters of the main government agencies,” Lyamin points out. “Even if these attacks do not cause radical military or economic damage, they force the diversion of significant resources to strengthen air defence,” he adds. The analyst does not mention another advantage, from a military point of view, of an attack with many civilian casualties: its impact on the morale of the population, which could then put pressure on their respective governments to surrender.
Other military experts, both Western and Russian, have also drawn parallels between the two conflicts. “This war is much more similar to the one in Iran and Iraq than to others,” Ruslan Pukhov, director of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies (CAST), told this newspaper. Meanwhile, the independent analysis institute Re:Russia warns: “[El entonces líder iraquí] Saddam Hussein plunged the country into conflict after a decade of oil-fuelled prosperity, which reinforced his personal dictatorship. But even the enormous human and economic cost, and the lack of tangible results from the war, could not undermine the regime and consolidated it even further.
The threat of possible mass attacks on cities also coexists with Russia’s repeated and barely veiled threat to use its nuclear weapons. On Saturday, the deputy head of the Russian Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, warned that his country’s patience has a limit when it comes to the use of such weapons. He was referring to the possibility that the West might authorize Ukraine to use long-range missiles against targets on Russian territory. The United States and kyiv, for their part, accuse Russia of using chloropicrin, a chemical weapon – like all others, prohibited by international law – on the front line, but there is no evidence so far of any chemical attack against cities.
Civilians as a target
The first aerial bombardments against cities in a war were directed against London and Paris in World War I (1914-1918), but on a small scale. They caused less than 1,000 deaths in the first and about 250 in the second. It was in the Spanish Civil War that the first bombings with a high number of victims took place. This strategy was later used on a massive scale during World War II.
In the case of the Iran-Iraq war, with which analysts now compare the possible outcome of the war between Russia and Ukraine, the massive attacks on Iranian cities and Tehran’s analogous response began in 1984. The war then opened war of the citieswhich had several chapters. According to an analysis by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Tehran ended up accepting the ceasefire “by surprise” because of a key turn in 1987, “when Iranian troops improved their defenses against chemical warfare and Iraq shifted its focus to the civilian population.”
In Ukraine, bombs have killed at least 11,743 civilians – including 673 children – and injured 24,614 people – 1,322 of them children – since Vladimir Putin ordered the full-scale invasion on 24 February 2022, according to the August report by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights of the UN. The international body has warned, however, that the massacre of civilians “is probably much higher”.
As for Russia, the authorities have not provided any total number of victims on its territory and have only offered partial data limited to the first half of 2024, when Ukraine intensified its response. The Russian Foreign Ministry reported 465 deaths on its territory in the first half of 2024, two months before Ukraine’s invasion of Kursk. Authorities in the Russian border region of Belgorod estimate that around 200 civilians have died throughout the war.
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