Strategic Review – July 3, 2026

The gloves are off. There seems to be no other choice.

There is a palpable sense now that Russia has significantly stepped up its military firepower to eliminate the NATO-backed Kiev regime.

It’s not just the NeoNazi cesspit in Kiev that needs to be eradicated. It’s the entire NATO project of proxy aggression that the regime epitomizes. Russia is winning on the battlefield, methodically and gradually, but given the air terror campaign that the NATO regime is mounting deep inside Russian territory, the knock-out blow must be delivered sooner.

This week saw the biggest wave of Russian air strikes on Ukraine since the conflict escalated back in February 2022. Multiple sites in the capital, Kiev, were hit overnight on Thursday, as well as other cities and regions. Hundreds of drones, ballistic missiles, and hypersonic munitions were deployed. Video footage indicated most of the strikes hit their targets with minimal air-defense interception.

Moscow said all targets were military-industrial sites. It said the use of massive force will intensify until all goals are achieved.

Several respected analysts have noted a new determination by Russia to win in outright military terms, relinquishing a parallel diplomatic effort. Andrey Martyanov, Larry Johnson, Douglas Macgregor, and John Mearsheimer are among those seasoned analysts who assess that the Russian leadership has concluded it needs to defeat the Kiev regime and its NATO handlers and bring this conflict to a prompt end on Russia’s terms.

The diplomatic track that the United States had promoted under Donald Trump has turned into a dead end. Meanwhile, the Kiev regime under NATO guidance has increased its terror attacks on the Russian population. In recent months, nearly 400 Russian civilians have been killed in long-range drone and missile strikes.

The worst atrocity was on May 22 when a college dormitory in Starobelsk, Lugansk, was demolished by multiple drone strikes, killing 21 students, most of whom were teenage girls. It was a turning point. Following that deliberate act of mass murder, Russia has increased and sustained its military assault on the Kiev regime and its decision-making centers. This week saw the aerial barrage go up several notches, and Moscow has said that the intensity will increase.

As analyst Andrey Martyanov commented, the NATO regime has lost the war on the ground except for the final, dwindling battlelines. The Kiev proxy, under instructions from its NATO commanders, is resorting to the last, desperate weapon of terrorism against Russian civilians. But Moscow needs to crush this desperate tactic to incite a full-blown war in Europe by preemptively extinguishing the NATO project in Ukraine.

There is an understandable feeling of anger among Russians that the NATO proxy war is dragging on and continuing to target civilians. This week, five people were killed when a market in the city of Tokmak, Zaporozhye, came under a Ukrainian drone attack. There were also deaths from attacks in the Belgorod and Nizhny Novgorod regions. A six-month-old baby was killed by a drone in the Moscow region about 100 km south of the Russian capital.

On June 17, a bus carrying a youth football team from Belarus was hit with Ukrainian drones in the Bryansk region, killing a pregnant woman. This week, another bus ferrying tourists from Belarus was also targeted.

There is no doubt that NATO and European planners are behind this upsurge in terror attacks by the Kiev regime. The European Union, under the guidance of former German military minister Ursula von der Leyen and others, is supplying Ukraine with a €90 billion handout, most of which is directed at increasing long-range drone firepower against Russia.

Western governments and news media are giving cover for the NATO terrorist campaign, as Russian diplomat Rodion Miroshnik points out.

There is minimal reporting in the Western media on the deliberate targeting of Russian civilians. The massacre at Starobelsk college was largely ignored, or if it was reported, the cynical denials of the Kiev regime were given credence.

Moreover, the NATO powers are emboldening the Kiev regime to increase the terror campaign. Western media reports characterize the Ukrainian drone and missile assaults as legitimate and relish the claim that “the war is being taken to Russia”. There is feverish speculation on “Can Putin hold out?”, meaning that the West approves of the attacks on civilians as a way to destabilize the Russian state. That is terrorism by definition.

In its Russophobic obsession, the West is gambling with starting World War Three. As Russian strategist Sergey Karaganov has argued, Russia must act decisively to terminate the threat that emanates not just from the regime in Kiev but from the NATO planners behind it.

The other propaganda function of the West is to depict Russian strikes as “terrorist” and indiscriminately killing Ukrainian civilians.

While ignoring deaths among Russian civilians, the Western media highlight alleged Ukrainian victims. The massive barrage by Russia this week reportedly killed 20-30 civilians. The figures rely on information from Ukrainian officials.

All deaths of civilians are regrettable. But the Western governments and media do not condemn Ukraine over Russian victims, indeed do not even acknowledge them or portray the deaths as justified. Russia says it is not deliberately targeting civilian centers. One has to bear in mind that the NATO regime routinely sequesters drone factories and command centers in civilian buildings. Secondly, assuming the latest death toll of 20-30 in Kiev is verified, the numbers are remarkably low given the massive Russian firepower used, which indicates that the intention is not to harm civilians; otherwise, the casualty numbers would be in the thousands.

Another factor is that the NATO air defenses are grossly inefficient at intercepting Russian missiles. American weapons technical expert Professor Ted Postol, in an in-depth interview with Nima Alkhorshid, estimates that the Patriot interceptors have a success rate of only 2-3 per cent. That means in any given air raid, scores of Patriot warheads are liable to crash into apartment blocks and other civilian structures. This could account for photos showing residential buildings with top floors damaged that the Ukrainian regime claims are caused by Russian strikes and which the Western media publish without question.

The conflict in Ukraine has been going on since the CIA-backed coup in 2014 and the subsequent NATO weaponization of the NeoNazi regime in Kiev. Since 2014, the regime, which glorifies World War Two Nazi collaborators, has killed thousands of ethnic Russians in deliberate terror campaigns. The open war that erupted in 2022 could have been avoided if Moscow’s diplomatic track had been reciprocated in 2015 via the Minsk Accords and again in late 2021 when Russia offered a new security framework for Europe. The United States and its European partners rejected any diplomacy, aiming instead to “strategically defeat” Russia through their Ukrainian proxy.

Readers should check out SCF’s weekly editorial dated February 25, 2022, published the day after Russian troops intervened in Ukraine in what was called a special military operation. Under the headline: ‘U.S., NATO-Backed Aggression Towards Russia Finally Checked,’ we wrote:

“Russia has for years warned that U.S. and NATO aggression was posing a critical danger to international security and had to stop. The revoking of arms control treaties by the U.S. (the ABM, INF, Open Skies Treaty) and the expansion of missile threats near Russia’s borders were no longer tolerable. Ukraine is really just one element of the bigger picture. But this week, Russia has finally moved to stop the aggression. It is a historic watershed.”

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Russia’s special military operation was not decisive enough to eradicate the NATO aggression and its NeoNazi regime. Too much expectation was vested in the possibility of Western diplomatic engagement. Trump’s futile foray has removed any illusion of that, while at the same time European NATO powers embolden more terrorism from Kiev.

More than four years of open war and bloodshed with an estimated Ukrainian military death toll of 1.5 million could have been avoided. Hundreds of Russian civilians have been killed by NATO-backed terrorism. Russia’s forbearance and willingness to achieve a diplomatic settlement have not been reciprocated.

Moscow seems to have realized that the solution is not through diplomacy at this stage or by reclaiming historic territory alone, but rather by ending the NATO project of aggression that Ukraine epitomizes. Definitively.

As Russian President Vladimir Putin noted recently, the West wants war with Russia through Ukraine, as Nazi Germany did in 1941. In that circumstance, a punch in the face is more appropriate and more likely to succeed than a faux diplomatic handshake.

The gloves are off. There seems to be no other choice.

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