Ukraine’s Deep Strikes Turn Russia’s Rear Into a Battlefield

“The war has indeed become part of everyday life in Russia’s rear,” Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces commander Robert “Madyar” Brovdi wrote on Telegram on Sunday, pointing to smoke rising from fuel facilities and enterprises involved in weapons production.

“Our job is to return the pain to the enemy,” he added.

According to Brovdi, 22 vessels linked to Russia’s so-called shadow fleet have been struck since the beginning of August alone. Ukraine’s “Crimean Switch Off” campaign, he said, hit 74 energy nodes in just two weeks and 243 over the preceding 45 days.

Ukraine’s deep-strike campaign is now being acknowledged even on Kremlin-controlled television.

Cracks in the Kremlin’s Script

During a recent discussion on Vladimir Solovyov’s television show, one speaker complained that parts of Russia’s leadership still had not adjusted to the war.

“Some of our officials continue to live as though it were still 2013,” he said.

A year later, Russia invaded Ukraine and occupied Crimea – now repeatedly targeted by Ukrainian strikes on military bases, air defenses and logistics.

The remark also acknowledged a new reality: Ukrainian deep strikes inside Russia have become impossible for Moscow’s propagandists to ignore.

Ukraine is not launching drones simply to show that it can reach deep inside Russia. It is targeting the machinery that enables Moscow to wage war: military production, fuel, logistics, air defenses and infrastructure supporting long-range attacks against Ukrainian cities.

‘There is nowhere to hide’

This unease is part of a growing trend on Russian television.

Earlier this month, a Russian state TV commentator acknowledged that the old distinction between the battlefield and Russia’s protected rear was disappearing.

“There is nowhere to hide in Russia,” he warned.

The admission followed drone activity near Gelendzhik on Russia’s Black Sea coast, bringing the war within roughly two dozen kilometers of the sprawling estate widely known as “Putin’s Palace.”

The compound itself was not hit, but the symbolism was difficult to miss: even one of the most protected symbols of Putin’s insulated Russia was no longer comfortably beyond Ukraine’s reach.

From ‘second army’ to second at home

Political analyst Paul Goble previously captured the transformation in a dark joke he shared with Kyiv Post: Russia was once presented as having the second-most powerful army in the world. Then it became the second-most powerful army in Ukraine. Now, it is not even the strongest army inside Russia itself.

What began as wartime ridicule increasingly reflects a strategic problem for the Kremlin.

Every Ukrainian drone approaching a refinery, weapons plant or military base forces Moscow to make choices. Air defenses protecting Russia’s rear cannot simultaneously protect forces at the front. Systems moved to guard Moscow, Crimea or strategic industrial sites are systems unavailable elsewhere.

Ukraine has changed the fundamental equation of the war. Moscow can still inflict enormous destruction on Ukrainian cities, but it can no longer assume that the infrastructure enabling those attacks will remain safely beyond Ukraine’s reach.

The Kremlin wanted a distant war.

Ukraine is making sure it no longer has one.