‘Sabotage’ and ‘deep strike’ strategy behind mystery fires
AS headlines surrounding the war in Ukraine go, they have so far garnered little attention.
But as the weeks drag into months in this bitter conflict, a series of unexplained fires and explosions at strategic locations in Russia have raised speculation over what some military analysts say could be a series of “deep strike” operations carried out by the Ukrainians.
For over a month now, mainly in areas that border Ukraine, fuel and ammunition storage depots, along with other militaryrelated installations, have mysteriously caught fire or blown up. On March 29, it was a series of explosions at an ammunition warehouse approximately 25 miles inside the Russian border and less than 50 miles from the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv.
On April 21, much deeper inside Russia, mysterious fires broke out first at the Central Research Institute of the Aerospace Defence Forces in Tver, a city northwest of Moscow, then at a chemical plant in Kineshma, 250 miles east of Moscow.
Only a day later it was the Korolyov Centre for Security and Civil Defence of the Population, just 15 miles from Moscow that went up in flames. On April 27, there were explosions across southwest Russia that destroyed an ammunition dump in Belgorod province.
While in some cases the Ukrainian military was clearly behind the strikes, including the helicopter attack on a Belgorod fuel depot, other fires are less obvious. In a giant country such as Russia where quite often poor maintenance of such facilities is not uncommon, a fire at such remote installations would not normally gather much attention.
But ever since Russian forces invaded Ukraine on February 24, there have been more than a dozen blazes which some analysts say point to a concerted campaign of “sabotage” and even “deep strike operations” carried out by the Ukrainians. For their part, Ukrainian officials have adopted a similar repose to that of the Israelis who never confirm or deny covert attacks.
In a post on the instant messaging service Telegram earlier this month, Mykhaylo Podolyak, a senior adviser to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, called the fires “divine intervention”.
“Large fuel depots periodically burn ... for different reasons,” he wrote. “Karma is a cruel thing.”
But many war analysts believe several of the infernos, particularly those tied to oil, fuel and ammunition storage facilities supplying Russian forces in the Donbas – the focus of their latest offensive – were deliberate and planned.
Writing recently in Foreign Policy magazine, Douglas London, a professor of intelligence studies at Georgetown
University’s School of Foreign Service and a former CIA operations officer, detailed how sabotage behind enemy lines is a fundamental element of special operations warfare.
“It’s an integral tool for an insurgency or an army facing an opponent with superior numbers or equipment, as is the case in Ukraine. It works best for those enjoying a home-field advantage,” said London.
Such a capability, he added, “has been in the modern US intelligence
War analysts believe several of the infernos, particularly those tied to oil, fuel and ammunition storage, were deliberate and planned
community’s playbook since the days of the World War II Jedburgh Program through which the CIA’s predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), supported resistance groups across Europe and Asia”.
To date, it’s been well known that for some years now Western military training, advice and support has been forthcoming to the Ukrainian defence establishment.
The provision, too, of crucial US and other European intelligence data has doubtless enabled and improved the effectiveness of any Ukrainian miliary operations, including any covert activity.
But as Professor London also points out, any such Western enabling of strikes inside Russia itself is laden with risk. Crudely or over-zealously executed it could “provoke rather than pre-empt” giving Russian president Vladimir Putin the excuse to escalate while underlining his argument of the threat posed by Nato interference and expansionism.
It goes without saying, of course, that few if any Western officials are willing to comment on whether deeper inside Russia an active campaign of sabotage hitting targets less directly related to the invasion is under way.
Perhaps some of the fires and explosions are indeed just coincidence or a series of “accidents” and result of poor maintenance.
But you would be hard pressed to find anyone who actually believes that, and no doubt there will be more fires and explosions to come inside Russia the longer its war in Ukraine continues.