Russia is on the rampage in Ukraine. Why did it take 4 years for the Kremlin ‘to get in the saddle’?

We all know the various expressions about how Russians take their time mounting their horses but then ride like lightening. Over the past four years of the war, it has been used by Western apologists for the ‘gently, gently’ approach of the Kremlin in its conduct of the Special Military Operation.

At various points, we were allowed to believe that finally the Russians had ‘taken off their gloves,’ if we may mix metaphors. I, myself used this figure of speech when I thought a decisive moment in the war was approaching. Finally, six or eight months ago, I saw that voices were being raised within Russia asking why Putin was dragging out the war. There was a sense that Russia had the wherewithal to strike hard and force a capitulation on the enemy but was for some reason continuing to fight with one hand tied behind its back. There was speculation over whether it was some character defect in the President that held him back, that imposed unnecessary caution which only emboldened NATO countries to ever more brazen provocations.

Then the 40-day drone campaign announced by Zelensky took hold and created a crisis situation for the RF as a whole. The very destructive drone attacks on Russian energy and civilian infrastructure deep in the heartland of the Russian Federation resulted in the loss of perhaps 40% of refining capacity, leading to widespread fuel shortages, meaning rationing and long lines at gas pumps in much of the country. In Russia, as most everywhere, that is a politically sensitive issue. At the same time, Ukrainian precision drone strikes on residential buildings, buses and trains were causing daily civilian deaths in many different localities of European Russia. On the border regions of Kursk, Belgorod and Kherson especially intense daily drone attacks were making life miserable for most everyone. And the Crimea, which had been the cradle of the Russian Renaissance when it was reunified with the Russian Federation in March 2014, was being cut off from mainland Russia by destruction of bridges in the north and west connecting to the Donbas and Novorossiya, and by attacks on the coastal road along the Sea of Azov which was the main supply route for civilian and military cargo from the mainland; truck and automobile traffic along that route fell by 10 times at the worst moments in that crisis, per official Russian state news.

However, the last straw was probably the recent Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil carriers in the Azov and Black Seas. Defense of all Russian ‘shadow fleet’ traffic from Ukrainian attacks would become a monstrous and likely unachievable task for the Russian navy, just as it had become impossible to defend the refineries and oil export sites across Russia from swarming drone attacks.

The impact of these developments demanded change of course lest there be a threat to political stability in the country. This was all the more pressing given that elections for the State Duma are approaching – election day is set for 20 September. Continuation of the ‘war of attrition’ could spell loss of control of the legislature by the ruling party. Looking back at the 1990s, we know what that could likely mean: return to rule by presidential decree and a serious setback for democracy in the country. That would be the benign outcome. A worse but also possible outcome would be the overthrow of the Putin government and installation in power in Russia of very aggressive patriots with few qualms about pressing the nuclear button and touching off a global war.

Against this background of looming crisis, it now appears that in the past several weeks the Kremlin has indeed heeded public sentiment for pounding Ukraine into submission without delay using all the military force at its disposal. We heard that the tough, no nonsense General Sergey Surovikin whose defensive line successfully repelled the NATO backed Ukrainian counter offensive of 2023 has been recalled from his political exile in North Africa to participate, possibly to lead the change to a dynamic, brutal and massive Russian offensive. This has translated into utter destruction of Ukrainian port facilities and vessels, both container ships and bulk cargo ships, in Odessa and Nikolaev, on the Black Seas as well as Izmail on the Danube, opposite Romania. These measures were complemented by attacks on ships in the Black Sea en route to Ukraine or departing Ukraine. In effect, Russia has established an effective blockade of Ukraine. By the public admission of Ukrainian authorities on television yesterday, this has halted entirely the export of 6 million tons of grain a month. What the Ukrainians are not publicly disclosing is the cut-off of Western military supplies that had been arriving by sea. We may expect that Russia will next destroy the land passage of military materiel by rail coming in across the Polish border in the region of Lvov. If and when that happens, Ukraine’s ability to continue the battle against Russia will be reduced to a matter of a few weeks.

One other very important part of the ongoing Russian assault on Ukraine is the targeted destruction of factories producing advanced drones and other materiel essential to the Ukrainian war effort. Today’s Guardian newspaper carries an article on the latest successful such missile strike by the Russians.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jul/30/us-firm-drone-factory-terminal-autonomy-ukraine-russia

You will note that The Guardian places its emphasis on this ballistic missile strike being what they consider to be the first Russian attack on a US-owned military production factory in Ukraine, the Delaware registered ‘Terminal Autonomy.’ The article explains in passing that the facility produced ‘deep strike’ precision drones that use AI-guided in their final kamikaze phase of attack so as to be impervious to Russian electronic warfare defenses.

From this article, I derive two important pieces of information. First, that all those triumphant news reports in Mainstream media on the brilliant Ukrainian drone engineers who are outrunning Russia’s military are utterly deceptive. As I have been saying, the United States is involved up to its neck in supplying and running the Ukrainian drone warfare, and not just by providing satellite reconnaissance data. The U.S. also has been working alongside European NATO members, who are delivering critical components for drone manufacture to the Ukrainians if not completely assembled drones. Second, that Russian missiles are entirely capable of destroying (The Guardian’s word) Ukraine’s arms factories using conventional missiles and drones. In a word, there is no need for Russia to use tactical nuclear weapons to vanquish Ukraine.

All of this brings us back to the initial question of why it took the Kremlin so long to change from a war of attrition strategy to a knock-out blow strategy. I am now coming around to the view that the answer lies not in the personality of the President but in the political forces that limit and perhaps even control his decisions on waging the war. I mean here the oligarchs who have imposed constraints on Vladimir Putin from the day he was advanced to the presidency by Boris Yeltsin more than 25 years ago. This war has enriched them directly, insofar as the most prominent among them own the minerals extraction enterprises that supply the raw materials to the state owned military industrial complex. It has enriched them indirectly by the way the transition from a civilian to a war economy has been accompanied by differentiated interest on loans for working capital between the favored few (oligarch owners of heavy industry) and discriminated against many (small and medium sized companies in the consumer goods and services domains). For the oligarch class, loss of their yachts and mansions in the United Kingdom may be considered a temporary nuisance compared to their enrichment at home in Russia. Also benefiting from the forever wars strategy have been the state security services which have used the war situation to strengthen their control over the general population.

It has taken this long and this far into the loss of deterrence, meaning the loss of Russian sovereignty, for the oligarch insiders to be pushed from the feeding trough and for the Kremlin to see its survival in changing course on the war.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2026