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Putin Faces Humiliating Dilemma as Domestic Crisis Rages

The Russian president needs to urgently change tactics more than four years into his war with Ukraine.

Vladimir Putin has been backed into an embarrassing corner as Ukrainian drones strike deeper and deeper inside Russia.

For several weeks, Ukraine has been launching waves of drone attacks into Russia, targeting cities such as Moscow and St. Petersburg and the country’s oil refineries, which are vital to funding the Kremlin’s invasion efforts.

Until now, Ukraine’s drone strikes had been largely limited to targets within around 1,000 miles of Kyiv-controlled territory. However, on Monday, Ukraine was able to send drones to the Siberian city of Omsk, more than 2,000 miles from Kyiv, targeting Russia’s largest refinery and a crude distillation unit.

As The Wall Street Journal noted, Russia did not have significant air defenses around Omsk because authorities did not believe Ukrainian drones could reach that far.

The improvement in Ukraine’s long-range drone capabilities is likely to allow it to inflict further damage on Russia’s oil and gas industry, as well as hundreds of military facilities much deeper inside the country.

One military expert suggested Putin may be forced to redeploy Russia’s already stretched air defenses across a much wider area to counter the deeper strikes, potentially leaving other parts of the country even more exposed.

“Russia has now lost both its operational and its strategic depth,” retired Royal Air Force Air Marshal Edward Stringer, who led operations at the British Ministry of Defense, told the Journal.

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“Russia has only got a certain number of air-defense assets, and those cannot all be on the front line,” Stringer said.

“The more territory Russia now has to defend, which is essentially all the way to Vladivostok, the more porous the front line becomes—which means that Ukraine will find it even easier to send ordnance through and into Russia’s rear.”

Mykola Bielieskov, a research fellow at the National Institute for Strategic Studies, a Ukrainian think tank, added that Kyiv is now “leveling the playing field” by opening up much larger areas of Russia to attack.

“In 2026, we can finally do, intensively, what Russia has been doing to us since 2022,” Bielieskov told the Journal.

“Russia is much bigger than us, and this means that the attacker has an advantage because they never know what will be struck next and will find it very difficult to defend. Undoubtedly, geography here works in our favor.”

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Ukraine continued its drone blitz on Thursday night, targeting an oil refinery in Russia’s southern Krasnodar Krai region. Oil storage facilities in Azov and Taganrog were also struck overnight, according to Meduza, an independent Russian news outlet.

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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky even joked about the success of Ukraine’s drone campaign during a meeting with Donald Trump at Wednesday’s NATO summit in Turkey.

When Trump asked Zelensky whether he would be willing to travel to Moscow for talks aimed at ending the war, he replied: “It’s difficult—there are a lot of Ukrainian drones there.”

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