Russia’s Foreign Ministry announced on May 25 that it plans to carry out “a series of systematic strikes” on defence industrial facilities in Kyiv, and called on all foreign nationals — including diplomatic staff — to leave the Ukrainian capital immediately. Foreign Minister Lavrov personally phoned US Secretary of State Rubio to advise evacuation of American embassy personnel. Al Jazeera reported that Russia cited a Ukrainian drone strike on a student dormitory in the Russian-occupied Luhansk region — killing 18 people — as the trigger. The announcement followed at least four killed and sixty injured in overnight strikes on Kyiv itself, and came just days after Russia’s third confirmed use of its Oreshnik hypersonic missile system. Meanwhile, an RAF jet carrying Defence Secretary John Healey had its GPS signal jammed near the Russian border while returning from a visit to British troops in Estonia, the BBC reported — a day after it emerged that Russian jets had “repeatedly and dangerously” intercepted an RAF spy plane over the Black Sea.
The received wisdom
The mainstream reading of Russia’s escalation language is straightforward: this is coercion with a purpose. Moscow wants to freeze Western arms deliveries, force a negotiated freeze that locks in its territorial gains, and reassure a domestic audience that it retains strategic initiative even as Ukraine’s drone campaign has successfully struck deep into Russian territory. The evacuation warning, in this framing, is a pressure tactic rather than a genuine military announcement — since Russia has repeatedly made sweeping threats that it then fails to execute at the advertised scale. The Ukrainian government urged its allies not to yield to what Foreign Minister Sybiha called “Russian blackmail,” and seventy-plus foreign diplomats visiting a bombed Kyiv neighbourhood on Monday made a show of solidarity. The received wisdom concludes that firmness is the appropriate response, and that caving to ultimata only invites more of them.
This reading is not wrong. It is simply incomplete.
A different read
There is a pattern in how Western governments respond to Russian escalation signalling that deserves more scrutiny than it receives. The pattern runs roughly like this: Russia announces a dramatic step, Western officials call it bluster, the step is partially executed, Western officials call it unacceptable but take no countermeasures, and the new baseline becomes the new normal. This cycle has repeated itself since at least 2014.
The GPS jamming of the RAF jet carrying the British Defence Secretary is illustrative. The BBC noted that in 2024, an RAF aircraft carrying the then-Defence Secretary Grant Shapps had its signal jammed in an almost identical incident near Russian territory. The previous month, a Su-35 fighter got close enough to a Rivet Joint surveillance aircraft to trigger its emergency systems and disable autopilot. John Healey called those flybys “unacceptable.” Nothing structural changed. We are now into a third similar incident in roughly eighteen months, and the Ministry of Defence had not even provided comment by the time the BBC’s story was published.
This is not a criticism of the officers involved, whose professionalism is evidently exemplary. It is a criticism of the political and strategic framework that keeps registering outrage and making no credible response. The historian Niall Ferguson has argued that one of the recurring mistakes in Western statecraft is confusing the expression of resolve with actual resolve — announcing red lines, watching them be crossed, and then announcing new red lines slightly further back. Russia, whatever its other dysfunctions, is a patient student of this pattern.
The Kyiv evacuation warning follows the same logic. Russia does not necessarily need to execute the announced strikes at the scale threatened. The announcement itself serves several purposes: it tests whether Western embassies leave (signalling lack of confidence in Ukrainian air defences), it imposes psychological costs on Kyiv’s civilian population, and it creates a domestic Russian political event — a “warning given” that can later be cited as justification for whatever actually happens. Ukraine claimed that its Luhansk drone strike hit an elite drone command unit, not civilian dormitory residents. Moscow called it “the last straw.” The factual dispute is probably unresolvable from outside; what matters strategically is that Russia has established a practice of assigning symbolic weight to Ukrainian strikes it finds politically convenient to condemn, then using those strikes as escalation anchors.
The third use of the Oreshnik missile matters here too. Unlike cruise missiles, hypersonic glide vehicles of this class are extremely difficult to intercept with current NATO air defence systems. Russia’s use of a weapon that the alliance cannot reliably stop is not purely military signalling — it is a statement about the limits of Western deterrence architecture. It invites the question: what, precisely, is NATO prepared to do if Russia begins genuinely systematic strikes on Kyiv’s infrastructure and civilian areas? The answer, so far, is to express concern, hold solidarity visits, and reiterate that Ukraine has the right to defend itself.
Ukraine’s position is not hopeless. Its drone campaign has achieved real effects on Russian energy infrastructure and military production. President Zelenskyy has called those strikes “entirely justified,” and the facts support that assessment. But asymmetric resilience is not the same as a strategic path to resolution. The Chornobyl Museum in Kyiv was destroyed in an overnight Russian missile attack this week — a culturally significant target whose destruction carried obvious symbolic weight about what kind of war Russia is willing to prosecute.
The West faces a genuine strategic dilemma that its public rhetoric consistently obscures: it has declared Ukraine’s sovereignty a vital interest while simultaneously placing effective ceilings on the support Ukraine receives. That gap between declaration and delivery is the space Russia exploits.
What to watch
- Whether Western embassies actually relocate staff from Kyiv — a move that would hand Russia a significant propaganda win by signalling diminished confidence in Ukrainian air defences.
- The pace of Ukrainian counter-battery operations against Oreshnik launch infrastructure in the coming weeks, and whether Western intelligence sharing supports those strikes more directly.
- Healey’s response when Parliament resumes: will the RAF GPS jamming produce any concrete policy consequence, or will it join the lengthening list of “unacceptable” incidents that are absorbed without structural response?
- Whether the Chornobyl Museum strike prompts any formal cultural-heritage protection mechanism, or whether it, too, simply becomes data.
— J