Cars are seen on fire after Russian missile strikes, as Russia’s attack continues, in Kyiv, Ukraine October 10, 2022.
Valentyn Ogirenko | Reuters
Russia has dramatically ramped up its missile attacks on Ukraine within the last 48 hours, and experts say the country is running out of options — in addition to supplies and munitions on the bottom.
Air raid sirens were once more sounding out across multiple regions in Ukraine Tuesday, with emergency services warning that more Russian strikes a probable.
It comes a day after a series of Russian attacks on cities including the capital Kyiv — launched in response to the bombing of Russa’s prized Kerch Strait bridge to Crimea — left no less than 19 people dead and over 100 injured.
Ukraine’s leadership has said it should not be intimidated by the most recent spate of attacks, with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy vowing to inflict more pain on Russian forces on the battlefield.
Supplies running out
Despite Moscow’s recent show of strength within the last day or so, experts say Russia’s forces are looking increasingly desperate and ill-equipped.
“We all know – and Russian commanders on the bottom know – that their supplies and munitions are running out,” Jeremy Fleming, director of GCHQ, considered one of Britain’s top intelligence agencies, will say Tuesday.
“Russia’s forces are exhausted. The usage of prisoners to strengthen, and now the mobilisation of tens of hundreds of inexperienced conscripts, speaks of a desperate situation,” he’ll say on the annual RUSI lecture, in response to pre-released comments.
The Russian population is starting to grasp the fact surrounding the war, in response to Fleming. “They’re seeing just how badly Putin has misjudged the situation. They’re fleeing the draft, realising they will not travel. They know their access to modern technologies and external influences can be drastically restricted. And so they are feeling the extent of the dreadful human cost of his war of selection.”
Destroyed armored vehicles and tanks belonging to Russian forces, after they withdrew from town of Lyman within the Donetsk region in Ukraine on Oct. 5, 2022.
Metin Aktas | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images
Removed from “the inevitable Russian military victory that their propaganda machine spouted,” it’s becoming clear that Ukraine’s bravery on the battlefield and in cyberspace, counteracting Russian propaganda, is “turning the tide” within the war,” Fleming will say.
Within the meantime, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision-making is looking increasingly flawed with “a high stakes strategy … resulting in strategic errors in judgement.”
CNBC has contacted Russia’s Ministry of Defense for a response to Fleming’s comments and is yet to receive a reply.
Fleming isn’t alone in believing that Russia is within the death throes each within the war — and back home.
Christoph Heusgen, chair of the Munich Security Conference, told CNBC last week that there are signs that Russia is “falling apart.”
“It is a black hole [in] Russia,” he said. “Putin has the monopoly on communication, on the media, his popularity stays high but left and right, things are falling apart. The military is under severe criticism, industry isn’t producing, and there are signs that the country is falling apart nevertheless it’s difficult to see how this may play out and the way long it should take but the top of Putin’s regime goes much faster,” he told CNBC in Warsaw.
“Would you’ve gotten believed that Ukraine’s military is where it’s today, they usually’re advancing?”
‘Thrust back against the aggression’
The multiple attacks on Ukraine Monday got here after a strategic and symbolic blow for Russia: an explosion that partially destroyed the Kerch Bridge that links the Russian mainland to Crimea, which Moscow illegally annexed in 2014.
Kyiv has not claimed responsbility for the bridge attack, although the blast was widely seen as humiliating for Moscow and creates one other obstacle to Russia supplying its troops in occupied areas of southern Ukraine.
Zelenskyy said in his nightly address Monday that Ukraine is not going to be intimidated by the strikes, vowing that the battlefield would turn out to be even “more painful” for Russia in response.
Lesia Vasylenko, a Ukrainian lawmaker, agreed. She told CNBC Tuesday that the country was prepared for more Russian attacks.
“We weren’t intimidated on the twenty fourth February [when Russia’s invasion began], we weren’t intimidated eight years ago and we weren’t intimidated for hundreds of years,” she told CNBC’s Squawk Box Europe.
“The one solution to survive this reality is to keep off against the aggression, to keep off against the Russian military.”
