Red Line Crossed: 'Russia Doesn't Bluff' - Retaliation Will Be Devastating'

Russia’s Infrastructure Strikes Show Crimean Bridge Was ‘Red Line’ and Kiev Crossed It: Observers

Sputnik News

Russia conducted massed long-range missile strikes against energy infrastructure, communications and military command facilities deep inside Ukraine on Monday, with the bombardment taking place two days after Ukrainian security forces carried out a terror attack against the Crimean Bridge linking the Russian peninsula to the mainland.

At a meeting of the Russian Security Council meeting on Monday, President Putin said that Moscow’s campaign of massed air and missile strikes against Ukraine were a response not only to the attack on the Crimean Bridge, but a long list of other terrorist actions by Kiev in recent months targeting Russian infrastructure and even Ukraine’s own cities and people. 

The Ukrainian authorities’ actions put them “on a par with the most odious terrorist groups,” and Russia could not “leave such crimes unanswered,” he said. If the terrorism against Russia continues, Moscow’s responses “will be tough and will correspond in scale to the level of threat posed,” Putin warned.

Monday’s strikes targeted infrastructure across an area stretching more than 1,000 km, with electricity-generating infrastructure and military targets stretching from Kharkov and Dnepropetrovsk to Odessa, Kiev, Ternpol and Lvov hit in missile attacks, which temporarily left swathes of the country without access to electricity.

‘Russia Doesn’t Bluff’

“I think Russia had warned that an attack on critical infrastructure such as the Crimean Bridge would represent a red line and that if Ukraine crossed it, the nature of the conflict would be transformed. And so I think we’re seeing a manifestation of this. Russia doesn’t bluff,” Scott Ritter, a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer, UN weapons inspector and independent military analyst, told Sputnik.

“I don’t know what Ukraine thought they were going to accomplish by attacking the Crimean Bridge. I don’t know if the momentary feeling of accomplishment is worth the price. That’s a question only Ukraine can answer once the full extent of the retaliation is understood. But this retaliation may be extended over time and will most likely be devastating. This is a tragedy for the Ukrainian nation. I’m not saying that Russia is not justified in doing this – I’m saying that it didn’t need to happen. And the blame rests fully with Ukraine for attacking the Crimea Bridge,” Ritter said.

The analyst pointed out that in the eight months up to this moment, Moscow largely restricted the special military operation to Ukrainian military targets, and avoided fighting the conflict in the same way that the Ukrainian military has since it began its terror bombing and shelling civilians in the Donbass in 2014.

Even Monday’s strikes were aimed at targets which are legitimate under the laws of war, Ritter emphasized. “They are legitimate infrastructure targets. They are legitimate command and control targets. This is not an assault on innocent civilian population centers. So there is a distinct difference between the way Russia approaches strategic conflict and Ukraine approaches strategic conflict.”