Ukrainian Drones Transforming Russia’s Enormous Size ‘From an Asset to a Liability,’ Sergey Medvedev Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, June 4 – Ukrainian drones have not only embarrassed Putin by spoiling his celebrations this year but also and more importantly called into question the long-standing assumption that Russia’s enormous size is an asset that represents “the ultimate guarantee of the state’s invulnerability,” Sergey Medvedev says.

            In fact, the Radio Liberty commentator says, as the drone attacks have highlighted, “Russia’s immense territorial bulk … is transforming from an asset into a liability [because] it is virtually impossible to shield or defend” all of it (svoboda.org/a/drony-protiv-imperii-sergey-medvedev-o-territorialjnom-proklyatii/33771956.html).

            Russia’s oil and gas infrastructure, its transportation routes, and its defense industries are all dispersed and all are now at risk, Medvedev says. Exclaves like Kaliningrad are even more so, but “even heavily protected areas like Moscow and St. Petersburg are no longer invulnerable.”

            “As a result,” he continues, “we have a country burdened with excessive, unprofitable and indefensible territory which it can’t continue to drag further into the 21^st century” and like the dinosaurs in the past, “Russia will not survive to the end of this century with its heavy and clumsy territorial body.”

            Putin’s war in Ukraine did not begin this process, but it has “only accelerated this process of decolonization and loss of control over space,” Medvedev says. And thus, “having begun the war by seizing territories, Russia will eventually lose them – and not only those it occupied in 2014 and 2022,” but many it occupied centuries earlier.