Putin's ulterior motive: "Wants to send a positive message"

TT

Published 18.15

            

            

           Smoke rises from areas in Kiev on Sunday morning, after a night of extensive Russian attacks.

           1 / 2Photo: Zoya Shu/AP/TT

Russia is making loud threats and firing powerful missiles at Kiev - but it is unlikely to decide a war that has stalled.

Vladimir Putin is doing what he can to raise morale at home, according to Russia expert Carolina Vendil Pallin.

This weekend, Russia bombed the Ukrainian capital Kiev with unusually large numbers of attack drones and missiles.

Now the government in Moscow is warning of further widespread attacks in the near future. Possibly of a more indiscriminate nature, as people are being urged to avoid both military and civilian sites.

Russia is trying in every possible way to break down the Ukrainians' resilience, says Carolina Vendil Pallin, research leader in the Russia group at the Swedish National Defence Research Institute (FOI):

- Because the successes on the battlefield are not happening.

"Want to distract"

Major attacks on Kiev are not expected to have any decisive military significance, as the war has stalled along the front line in the east. That is not apparently the purpose, according to Vendil Pallin.

- This is being done more to break the political will in Kiev. But so far it has been shown that the more they press, the more resistance in Kiev, she says.

The war has recently affected Russia to an ever greater extent. Ukraine's attacks are hitting more places and are causing greater uproar among the civilian population.

A few weeks ago, a short ceasefire was brokered so that a traditional military parade could be held in Moscow. The fact that Vladimir Putin practically had to ask Ukraine for permission was a humiliation from which he is now trying to recover, writes the think tank Institute for the Study of War (ISW) in an analysis.

Putin is also believed to want to distract from the fact that Russia cannot stop drone attacks on Moscow and other cities.

Aim to intimidate

The Russian economy is under severe strain and although a majority of Russians support the war, polls seem to show that more and more people want it to end, points out Carolina Vendil Pallin.

Elections to the State Duma, the parliament, will be held this autumn.

– It is not that those in power are afraid of losing the election, but they would like to have positive messages to deliver to the population, says the FOI researcher.

Russia's threat against Kiev is accompanied, as on several previous occasions, by warnings to foreign citizens to flee the city immediately. There is also an ulterior motive there, according to Vendil Pallin:

“They are pushing for us to be afraid, for us to stop supporting Ukraine and see it as pointless. It is very much an influence operation on their part,” she says.