In total, over the past day, Russia launched 95 missiles of various types, 34 of which were intercepted, as well as a number of Iranian-made Shahed drones, the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine reported on Friday.

Nearly half a million people were left without power in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, after the latest attack, according to the regional governor.

And there are fears about how effectively Ukraine will be able to resist such bombings.

But such airstrikes will not win the war with Russia, Western experts say to CNN.

“There is a long history of nations trying to win wars by using strategic bombing to break the will or resilience of an opposing power,” Justin Bronk, a senior fellow at the Royal Air and Technology Think Tank, told CNN. United Services Institute (RUSI). , based in London. “He has an incredibly low success rate.”

Russia’s limited reserves mean that it is unlikely to be able to force a significant advance in the war in the skies until its air force can gain the upper hand over Ukraine.

A new strategy?

According to Bronk, the use of so many different weapons systems in one night is becoming an increasingly popular method of air strikes in Russia, but with longer intervals between strikes.

The use of hypersonic missiles, in particular, follows years of pressure from the Kremlin to equip its military with such weapons, a move that the United States and the West have been less enthusiastic about given the trade-offs involved in pursuing hypersonic capabilities.

“You get a missile that is much harder to intercept and gives the adversary much less warning. What you’re losing is that it’s much more expensive, and it’s often only portable on a much more limited number of platforms,” explained Bronk. (complete on CNN)

How did the defense of Ukraine hold up? Not good enough

Ukrainian air defense systems were unable to counter some Russian Kinzhal missiles, according to presidential adviser Volodymyr Zelenskyi, following a large-scale attack by Moscow on Thursday, CNN reported.

Kinjal missile during exercises in February 2022 Photo: Profimedia

In total, 84 missiles were fired at Ukrainian infrastructure, including six Kinzhal ballistic missiles, which have the ability to bypass Kyiv’s air defense system, the Ukrainian military reported.

“They use hypersonic missiles. They use new types of weapons and see how our air defense systems can cope,” said Oleksandr Rodnyansky, Zelenskyi’s economic adviser. “I’m not doing well enough,” he said.

Rodnyansky noted that what Russia considers to be tactical, economic and political goals are actually “economic terrorism.”

“They are sending a very strong signal to everyone in Ukraine – and perhaps to some of our refugees outside of Ukraine – that life is very far from returning to normal, even though there has been more calm in recent weeks,” he said.

That could force refugees to stay away and businesses to stop investing in the country, Rodnyanski said.

Future attacks?

Although Russia has deployed several missiles that Ukraine is currently unable to stop, it seems unlikely that such attacks will become a regular or decisive feature of the conflict, as Russia is facing a supply crisis according to most Western assessments.

Russia has been stockpiling missiles for a month to launch another massive strike

The Main Intelligence Directorate of Ukraine (GUR) said on Friday that Russia had stockpiled missiles for a month to carry out a new large-scale strike on Thursday, Ukrainian Pravda reports.

The Iskander-M system in service with Russia Photo: Konstantin Morozov / Sputnik / Profimedia Images

“The racists continue their missile terror, but already taking into account the shortage of high-precision missiles they have today, we can say that they have been accumulating strength for a month, working, in particular, on production,” said Andriy Yusov, GOUT’s press secretary.

He noted that the missiles that the Russian arms industry can produce in a month were used by Moscow’s armed forces to destroy Ukrainian transformers.

Yusov said that Russia’s stockpiles of many types of missiles are “critically low” and that the increasing time interval between large-scale attacks is due to the fact that the Russians are trying to compensate for the consumption of ammunition by production, but cannot produce the necessary volumes.

Do the Russians still have missiles or not? Western analysts have been wrong before

One possibility is that Russia is running out of other types of missiles it would normally use for such attacks, so it is turning to more expensive designs.

But during the war, Western analysts were repeatedly wrong about the number of missiles Russia would still have in its arsenal, and predictions are conflicting.

Thus, in December, the Secretary of the National Security Council Oleksiy Danilov estimated that Russia could carry out 3-4 more large-scale attacks before the reserves are exhausted.

But at the end of January, the head of the Estonian intelligence service, Margo Grosberg, said that Russia could launch repeated massive missile strikes on Ukraine within nine months.

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