Russian forces launched what Kyiv Mayor Vitaly Klitschko called the “most massive attack” on the Ukrainian capital overnight on Wednesday, deploying 74 missiles and 496 drones in waves lasting more than eleven hours. At least 30 people were killed and 91 injured. A nine-storey residential block in Darnitskyi district partially collapsed; a crater was left beside a kindergarten; the Ukrainian Red Cross lost a warehouse containing 320,000 relief items. President Zelensky appealed to Washington to grant Ukraine licences to manufacture Patriot air defence missiles domestically. The same day, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk warned that the coming months could be “critical” in the face of a Russian threat, citing US intelligence reports of Moscow planning an armed “provocation” on Polish territory timed to coincide with the NATO summit in Ankara next week.
The received wisdom
The progressive-liberal consensus on this attack will be familiar: it underscores Ukraine’s heroic resistance and the indispensable need for continued Western military and financial support. The destruction of civilian infrastructure — a residential block, a kindergarten, a humanitarian warehouse — is, on this reading, self-evidently a war crime and a moral argument for maximum allied response. Zelensky’s Patriot licence request is reasonable and should be granted. The attack also vindicates the argument that a negotiated settlement would simply reward Russian aggression and encourage more of it. Tusk’s warnings about Poland are taken as further evidence that the threat to Western security is existential and that increased NATO defence spending is both urgent and justified.
There is nothing dishonest in this reading. Russia is the aggressor. The scale of civilian suffering in Ukraine over more than four years of full-scale war is genuine and documented. The deaths of thirty people in a single night in Kyiv’s residential districts are not abstractions. The liberal framing is morally coherent even if it is not analytically complete.
A different read
What the received wisdom tends to suppress is the uncomfortable question of what Western deterrence theory has actually produced. The attack deployed a record number of weapons not because Russia has been undeterred — Russia has been heavily sanctioned, its proxies degraded, its Supreme Commander-in-Chief isolated — but because deterrence without a credible endpoint is not deterrence at all. It is managed escalation.
The BBC’s own reporting notes a pattern shift over the last two months: Russian attacks on Kyiv have become less frequent but “longer, more powerful, and more widespread.” This is not a country being deterred. It is a country recalibrating its operational tempo for a long campaign. Aviation analyst Bohdan Dolintsev noted that the simultaneous deployment of multiple weapon types creates an “exceptionally complex challenge” for air defences — a lesson Russia has now absorbed and will apply again.
The Poland angle is even more troubling. Tusk’s warning was not about some speculative future threat; it was a response to specific US intelligence reports about a planned Russian “provocation” on NATO soil — potentially missiles, drones, or even troops — timed to pressure Western allies into suspending aid to Ukraine. The Polish president is attending the NATO summit in Ankara precisely as this warning lands. Tusk had told the Financial Times as far back as April that Russia could attack a NATO member state “within months.” His Deputy Prime Minister Radek Sikorski told CBS News he would not rule out a Russian “false flag” operation within two years.
The logic of the Kremlin’s position is not irrational, viewed from Moscow’s perspective. If a strike on NATO infrastructure fragments the alliance — if Hungary objects, if Trump wavers, if public opinion in Western Europe reaches its limit — then the escalation costs are worth bearing. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters Russia would “continue to increase pressure on the Kyiv regime in order to achieve our set goals.” That is not posturing; it is a statement of intent that NATO members are, apparently, still debating how seriously to take.
This connects to a deeper structural problem: Article 5 of the NATO treaty commits members to collective defence, but the precise form of that defence is discretionary. Russia appears to be probing the space between treaty obligation and political will, the gap where deterrence theory lives on paper but in practice depends on thirty-two democratic governments agreeing, in real time, on the nature of “armed attack.” Hybrid warfare — drone incursions, infrastructure sabotage, false-flag provocations — is specifically designed to exploit that definitional ambiguity.
The historical parallel that comes to mind is not 1939 but 1936: Hitler’s remilitarisation of the Rhineland, a move that violated the Versailles and Locarno treaties but which Western powers chose not to contest because the form of the violation was ambiguous and the domestic political cost of response was high. The window of deterrence that was lost then took six years and fifty million lives to recover. The parallel is not exact — Russia is not Nazi Germany, and NATO today is not the League of Nations — but the structural dynamic, a revisionist power probing the gap between treaty and political will, rhymes uncomfortably.
Zelensky’s request for Patriot manufacturing licences is not primarily a hardware question; it is a signal of what Ukraine has concluded about the long-term reliability of Western supply chains. If the alliance will not grant production rights after four years of war, the message sent to Kyiv — and to Moscow — about Western staying power is clear.
What to watch
- The NATO Ankara summit communiqué, specifically whether it includes a credible collective response doctrine for hybrid attacks on member territory.
- Whether Washington grants Ukraine the Patriot manufacturing licences Zelensky has requested — this is the single most concrete test of alliance commitment in the near term.
- Russia’s next moves around Polish and Baltic infrastructure; Latvian intelligence has previously warned of planned Russian provocations in the region.
- The political effect in Hungary, Slovakia, and potentially Germany if a Russian “provocation” on NATO soil is attributable but deniable — coalition fracture is Moscow’s primary strategic objective.
— J