Early Monday morning, a bomb went off in Moscow. It happened in the lobby of a luxury apartment complex, Scarlet Sails, located in a well-to-do neighborhood in the northwestern part of the city.
The explosion ended up killing a man named Armen Sargsyan. He was the leader of a pro-Russian paramilitary group in eastern Ukraine and had been a wanted man in Kyiv since 2014.
Videos from the scene of the blast began appearing online, showing the aftermath of the incident. When first responders arrived at the scene, glass and debris was scattered everywhere, and there was still smoke in the air.
In a Deutsche Welle report, a local woman said, “I have three kids, and I’m really terrified.”
Russia’s investigative committee has launched an investigation into what it called “an assassination” that was “carefully planned.”
This kind of attack has happened before, most recently in December, when Igor Kirillov, a Russian lieutenant general was killed by a bomb concealed in a scooter outside the entrance of an apartment building. Kirillov led Russia’s nuclear protection forces. These attacks deep inside Russia have become part of a larger strategy of Ukraine trying to take the fight directly to Russia.
The operations are the latest in what seems to be a campaign of assassinations. Some of them are thought to be orchestrated by Ukraine’s military Intelligence agency, known as HUR. In most cases, Ukraine doesn’t claim responsibility — but it doesn’t deny its involvement either.
Sergiy Grabskyi, a retired Ukrainian colonel and military expert, said that these attacks have a psychological impact.
“It destroys the confidence of Russian society that Moscow can provide protection to any Russian region,” he said.
Targeted attacks also send a message to those who’ve participated in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In most cases, according to Grabskyi and others, Ukrainian intelligence plans the operations but doesn’t execute them.
“We don’t even need to send our boys there,” Grabskyi said. “We recruit locals in Russia to kill those guys. And we will do that, by Russian hands.”
Most of the deep strikes that Ukraine conducts inside Russia aren’t aimed at individuals. The main target is Russia’s oil and gas infrastructure.
“Fuel is like the blood of war,” Grabskyi said. “Without fuel, you cannot deploy troops, you cannot deploy ammunition and supplies, water, food, you cannot provide medical evacuation and so on.”
Another military expert, Valeriy Romanenko, at the National Aviation University in Ukraine, said that this campaign of hitting oil refineries and depots in Russia has been ongoing for about a year.
“Russia is financing the war with the money it receives from oil and gas exports. To pay its military, produce weapons, ammunition and also to buy electronic components,” Romanenko said.
Those components are crucial for missiles and sophisticated weapons systems. So, Ukraine is targeting Russia’s most-important revenue stream. In the past few weeks, Ukraine has hit multiple major oil refineries inside Russia.
“I am completely sure that all attacks were provided from Ukrainian territory, using the Ukrainian long-range drones, because now, we have a large number of drones with a range up to 1,200 kilometers [750 miles],” Romanenko said.
Yuriy Sak, an adviser to the minister of strategic industries in Ukraine, said that Kyiv is developing longer-range, deep-strike drones.
“Our philosophy, we understand that we are, first of all, restricted by our partners in terms of long-range capabilities that we receive and, second of all, we understand that we need to take the war back to Russia and put pressure on them, that’s our strategy for now,” Sak said.
Ukraine has relied on its own military production capabilities to conduct strikes deep inside Russia. On the front lines, Ukraine is slowly losing ground, as Russian troops advance in the eastern part of the country. Sak said that the deep strikes impact the Kremlin’s thinking, but also the perception of Ukraine by its partners.
“They see that we are not just sitting idly and asking for military support,” Sak explained. “We are producing these capabilities ourselves, and by conducting these strikes, we give them an argument that Ukraine is still standing, that Ukraine is fighting back.”
Sak said that Ukrainians want the war to end more than anyone else in the world. But he also talks about a “just peace,” which he believes can only be achieved if Ukraine shows strength. Otherwise, he said, Russia will not be deterred.