A senior member of Russia’s parliament on Tuesday said that Russia is planning to escalate its attacks on Kyiv by targeting underground facilities and bunkers used by Ukrainian military commanders and leadership.
Russia has informed the US and its European allies to evacuate their personnel from the Ukrainian capital as Moscow is planning major strikes that it says are a response to the May 22 Ukrainian drone attack that hit a college in Starobelsk in the Luhansk Oblast, killing 21 people, and other strikes on civilians.
According to RT, Andrey Kartapolov, the head of the Russian State Duma’s Defense Committee, said that Russia’s “patience has run out” and that it will target “underground fortified [military] command and control centers” and bunkers used by Ukrainian security services and leadership.
The Russian Foreign Ministry has said targets will include the facilities used to develop drones and “decision-making centers” in Kyiv. Kartapolov said that “decision-making centers” do not include the Ukrainian parliament or Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s office because Ukrainian MPs don’t control the military and because the Ukrainian leader is rarely in his office.
Writing in Responsible Statecraft, Anatol Lieven, director of the Eurasia Program at the Quincy Institute, said that Russia will likely use its Oreshnik hypersonic missiles to target “the underground headquarters in Kyiv where US and European officers have been helping the Ukrainian armed forces to target Russia with missiles and drones.”
Lieven noted that Russia has so far refrained from targeting the headquarters despite Ukraine’s frequent attacks on Russian command centers due to concerns that Russia would likely kill US and other NATO soldiers and intelligence officers, which could lead to a major escalation from the West.
Russia has also likely refrained from taking the step as it has been involved in negotiations with the Trump administration to potentially end the war, but those talks appear to have hit a dead end, as US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said last week that there are “no such talks occurring at this time.”
