They are both torching warehouses filled with food or online-shopping orders near major cities. They are blasting ports and ships carrying vital exports of grain. And they are smashing energy networks that keep the lights on and vehicles fueled.
Russia and Ukraine, in cities far from the front line, are waging an intensifying tit-for-tat air war that is bringing more pain to the populations of both countries than at any other point since the early months of the full-scale war launched by Moscow in 2022.
With the front largely frozen, each side is using growing arsenals of missiles and drones to exact vengeance and to try to pummel the other into submission. In the most recent example, Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, has been under constant bombardment from Russian drones over the past few days, tormenting residents with nearly continual air-raid alerts.
Still, there is no evidence that the escalation will weaken either country’s determination to fight on. Human suffering will only grow this winter, analysts say, as both Russia and Ukraine seek leverage in U.S.-backed settlement negotiations that are expected to resume after achieving little this year.
Ukraine can’t give up, and Russia doesn’t want to, analysts say.
“It’s a question of how much pain can Russia take compared to Ukraine — and Russia can take a lot of pain,” said Rob Lee, a military expert at the Philadelphia-based Foreign Policy Research Institute who travels frequently to the front line.
This new period of eye-for-an-eye assaults accelerated in late June, when Ukraine opened a 40-day campaign against Russia that President Volodymyr Zelensky said was aimed at “compelling it to end the war.”
Since he threw down that gauntlet, Ukrainian long-range drones have hit more than 30 warehouses of major online shopping companies, mostly those used by Wildberries, the Russian equivalent of Amazon. The strikes have disrupted Russian commercial logistics, inflicted heavy losses on small merchants and killed several warehouse workers.
Ukraine has also continued its attacks on Russian oil refineries and fuel logistics. About 70 percent of Russian gas stations ran out of gasoline or diesel last month, sparking the country’s worst fuel crisis since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. The Kremlin scrambled to fix the situation, allowing lower-grade gas and diesel to be sold. But through mid-August, there were two-hour lines at every station in Moscow that still had gas.
In addition, Ukrainian strikes on infrastructure in the Sea of Azov and the broader Black Sea basin have hamstrung agricultural exports by Russia, the world’s largest exporter of wheat, and have left the occupied Crimea Peninsula isolated.
“Their economy will start collapsing — it already is,” said Olena Ivashko, 48, a Ukrainian grocery worker who has had four male relatives killed fighting in the war. “Until they start eating each other alive, they will not understand that there is a war. They didn’t understand what war was until they started standing in lines for gasoline.”
The Russian economy is not in danger of imminent collapse, even as growth has slowed to almost a standstill and the budget deficit has ballooned. But the attacks deep inside Russia have made the war feel closer to Russians than ever before, and Russian civilians are dying in such strikes at the highest rate since the war began.
Pyotr, a book editor in the Russian capital, said that this summer the “first cracks appeared on the surface of Moscow’s well-being.” Yevgeny, a motorcycle enthusiast, described sleepless nights every time he saw a warning about a potential drone attack. Both men asked that only their first names be used to protect their security.
After Ukraine’s 40-day campaign ended, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia said that Kyiv had opened “Pandora’s box” by trying to damage the Russian economy and would pay the price. As has been the case throughout the war, the Russian assaults that followed have inflicted more suffering on Ukrainians than anything that Russians have endured.
