Article #79624

Taking war to heart of Russian territory has seized initiative and reset Zelenskyy’s relationship with Trump

On 26 June, the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, announced that he was ordering Ukraine’s state security service to launch a 40-day campaign against Russian targets aimed at “influencing the aggressor state in order to compel it to end to the war”.

Since then, Kyiv has sharply escalated attacks on Russia under the aegis of a series of overlapping operations striking key supply lines in Ukraine’s Russian-occupied territories, including Crimea, and striking Moscow and St Petersburg in a series of high-profile long-range missile attacks, triggering a fuel crisis.