Vladimir Putin has “made a decision” and there will be “severe punishment” following Ukraine’s incursion into Russia, according to the Russian ambassador to the US.
Mr Putin was clearly frustrated at the Ukrainian incursion, but a ruthless Russian military response was only one option. Ukraine is short of military capability - soldiers and weapons - and it appears that they have deployed up to 10,000 soldiers (probably battle-hardened) into Russian territory. This “fixes” these Ukrainian forces well away from the frontline Russian action in the Donbas.
Mr Putin knows that progress on the frontline will slow when winter arrives, so his forces have perhaps 10 to 12 weeks remaining to achieve the objectives of his so-called Special Military Operation. By focusing on Russian main effort in the Donbas, Mr Putin knows that Ukraine has diluted the forces available to resist the Russian assault towards Pokrovsk, which might enable greater progress in the limited time available.
Once Russia’s objectives in the Donbas have been achieved, Mr Putin might consider that he can address the Kursk incursion in slower time.
What could ‘severe punishment’ mean?
What could it mean? Who knows. Russia likes to talk big but does balk at actually hitting the west. They draw red lines, the west cross them, they step back and draw some more with vague threats and glances back at their actual red line that results in use of nuclear weapons which is direct, open western troop involvement.
Like China who likes to draw red lines that the US ignores it’s easy to say these things, harder to actually do something severe when you’re staring down an unhinged, amoral, deranged, entitled mad civilization and empire like the US who’s just glaring with a twitching eye at you and an unhinged look on their face who is likely to take any excuse, any affront to their power and sense of superiority and invincibility to react with full force and enter an unescapable escalation spiral that leads to total war. Unfortunately this leads to even more NATO/US western arrogance and boundary pushing, to salami-slice tactics, etc.
So the consequences as usual will be born by Ukrainians. Most likely doing things like taking out more/most of Ukraine’s transport and electricity infrastructure to cripple them and their supply lines.
Otherwise it’s most likely just talk which will be followed by some more strikes against hard military targets. But these kinds of strikes aren’t really meaningful or different because well it’s not like Russia is holding one hand behind their back, it’s not like they know the location of Ukrainian command and control centers and intelligence bunkers run with the CIA and are just choosing not to bomb them until moments like this. So they’ll do a strike they’d do anyways but film it and release that film and say that’s their punishment.
The reason the Russians haven’t just bombed the SBU’s headquarters or other targets like that in Kiev is because they know that’s not where most operations are coordinated from these days (and leaving them intact in the hope they can eventually track someone from there who messes up and leads them somewhere more interesting) but they don’t know where these bunkers that the CIA helped them build under forests are where they actually are coordinating from. For that matter these bunkers could very well be in the far west of Ukraine out of reach of the kind of heavy bombs needed to penetrate them or for that matter in Poland for all we know.
it’s like that Bill Hicks skit about the US being Jack Palance in the movie Shane. He throws a gun on the ground and tells some poor guy who was just on his way into town to pick up groceries to “pick up the gun” from the ground so he can shoot him for having a gun.