Look at the Ukraine War to Understand Why Israel Struck Iran

June 14, 2025

By David French
Opinion Columnist

While it’s far too soon to tell whether Israel’s military strikes will cripple or even substantially set back Iran’s nuclear program, the necessity of stopping Iran’s march to a bomb is far more clear today than it was even three years ago.

Two things have happened since President Trump’s first term that alter the strategic calculus: Russia invaded Ukraine, and Hamas massacred Israeli civilians.

The first event taught the world a lesson it shouldn’t forget. When a nuclear-armed nation engages in armed aggression, the rest of the world’s options narrow considerably. If Russia didn’t possess a nuclear deterrent, it’s highly likely that Western support would have been more immediate, more intense and more decisive.

Instead, Western powers were often slow to approve new weapons transfers, and when they did provide more capable weapons, they initially placed sharp limits on their use. Western aid certainly kept Ukraine alive, but restrictions on that aid have inhibited its defense.

One could easily imagine a NATO-enforced no-fly zone, or granting Ukraine weapons and a freedom of action to use those weapons that is more similar to the freedom Israel currently enjoys. But at every step Western powers have worried that they might be pushing Russia too far. This means that aid has often been too slow and too limited to give Ukraine a viable chance of reversing Russian gains.

Russia’s nuclear arsenal, in other words, serves as the world’s most dangerous insurance policy. It grants Russia the ability to launch aggressive military operations while also exercising at least some degree of control over the armed response.

North Korea’s nuclear arsenal serves the same purpose. It means that Western powers can’t really contemplate the same kind of military actions that ultimately ended Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq or Muammar el-Qaddafi’s regime in Libya.

While the West might look at both interventions as cautionary tales (they unleashed considerable disorder), dictators look and see something else: a gruesome end to despotic regimes, an end they desperately want to avoid for themselves.

Now, imagine Iran with even a modest nuclear arsenal. Even if it didn’t try to obliterate Israeli cities, it could use its arsenal to grant it a freedom of action in conventional war that it currently lacks. Like Russia, it could be relentlessly aggressive at the same time that its nuclear weapons could maintain the regime, even in the face of military defeat. They would constrain Israel’s ability to defend itself.

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At the same time, Israel is living with the reality since Oct. 7, 2023, that its enemies will directly target civilians, massacre them on video and celebrate their deaths. Is there a sovereign nation on the planet that would then permit its chief adversary — the primary military backer of its terrorist enemies — to possess the ultimate weapon of mass destruction if it believes it can do so at a reasonable military cost?

In fact, Israel has a much better window of opportunity to stop Iran’s race to a bomb than either India or Pakistan had to stop each other’s nuclear program — or than the United States and South Korea had to stop North Korea. Each of those nations possessed enormous, intact conventional forces that would have made any military intervention extraordinarily costly.

Iran’s military capabilities, by contrast, have been sharply degraded. It still retains the ability to strike Israel with its missiles (it hit Tel Aviv on Friday, causing some damage), but Israel has a capable missile defense. Its proxies in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria have suffered a series of catastrophic military defeats. And previous attacks from Israel damaged Iran’s air defenses. Iran is weaker than it’s been in years.

None of these arguments mean that Israel will prevail or that the strikes will prove effective or wise in the long term. We have to wait on the results of the conflict to understand that. But for now the combination of Iran’s weakness and the catastrophic consequences of an Iranian bomb mean that Israel’s strikes are both more justifiable — and more likely to succeed — than at any time in the recent past.

Russia Strikes Ukraine in Retaliation for Covert Drone Operation & Other News

 

Russia Strikes Ukraine in Retaliation for Covert Drone Operation - At least three were killed and 49 injured in a missile-and-drone attack that focused on Kyiv, days after a daring assault on Moscow’s bomber fleet.

• Trump administration is seeking to weaken Sen. Lindsey Graham’s Russia-sanctions bill. The White House wants flexibility in applying sanctions to aid Russia ties. Graham’s bill has bipartisan support, though he has said he plans to make at least some changes to the bill.

• The Supreme Court made it easier for workers to sue for reverse discrimination.  The court’s unanimous decision Thursday revives a lawsuit brought by Marlean Ames, who alleged the Ohio state agency where she works denied her a promotion, and then demoted her, because she is heterosexual.

  Trump's new travel ban is expected to be harder to fight in court than the previous version. In its Wednesday proclamation, the Trump administration provided specific rationales, saying several of the countries have unacceptably high temporary-visa overstay rates, necessitating a ban on more of their nationals entering the U.S.

  A judge blocked Trump’s ban on foreign students at Harvard. The federal judge issued a temporary restraining order against the Homeland Security Department that prevents it from “implementing, instituting, maintaining, enforcing, or giving force or effect” to a proclamation Trump issued late Wednesday that prevented foreign nationals from entering the U.S. to study at Harvard University. Israel has been collaborating with a Palestinian militia in Gaza as part of a broader effort to fight Hamas in the enclave. Trump and Xi Jinping spoke on the phone. Trump called it a “very positive” conversation, and the U.S. and China agreed to hold more trade talks. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, said he wanted to expand access to “experimental,” unproven medical treatments like stem-cell and chelation therapies. But he conceded that the industry was rife with fraud.

Ukraine Shows It Can Still Flip the Script on How Wars Are Waged

The attack demonstrated Ukraine’s ability to use relatively cheap drones to take out expensive aircraft and to strike sites far from its borders.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said on Monday that Sunday’s drone strikes, known as Operation Spider Web, had “seriously weakened” Russia’s military operations.Credit...Emmanuele Contini/NurPhoto, via Getty Images

By Helene CooperJulian E. BarnesEric SchmittLara Jakes and Adam Entous
June 2, 2025

In launching an audacious drone attack on airfields and warplanes deep inside Russia, Ukraine is continuing to change the way wars will be conducted in the 21st century, according to U.S. officials and military analysts.

American and European security officials said battle damage assessments were still coming in from the attacks, which took place Sunday, but they estimated that as many as 20 Russian strategic aircraft may have been destroyed or severely damaged, dealing a serious blow to Russian’s long-range strike capabilities.

Officials said Russia’s losses included six Tu-95 and four TU-22M long-range strategic bombers, as well as A-50 warplanes, which are used to detect air defenses and guided missiles.

The attack, known as Operation Spider’s Web, hurt Moscow’s prized strategic capabilities. But just as significantly, it demonstrated Ukraine’s ability to strike nearly anywhere in Russia, and to destroy warplanes costing $100 million or more with drones with price tags as low as $600, according to one U.S. defense official.
Russian Tu-95 long-range strategic bombers, shown during a military parade rehearsal in Moscow in 2018, were among the warplanes destroyed by Ukraine’s attack.Credit...Pavel Golovkin/Associated Press

U.S. officials said that Ukraine did not give the Trump administration advance notice that forces with Ukraine’s Security Service, or S.B.U., were planning the attack, which targeted several air bases inside Russia, including one in Siberia.

In carrying out the strikes, Ukraine deployed agents far from its borders. For instance, the distance from Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, to Belaya Air Base, one of the targets, is more than 3,000 miles. The drones were smuggled into Russia and packed inside wooden transport containers that had remote-controlled lids and then loaded onto trucks, the S.B.U. said in a statement.

One U.S. defense official compared the Ukrainian move to the Israeli operation last year that targeted the pagers of Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon.

President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said on Monday that the drone strikes had “seriously weakened” Russia’s military operations.

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“‘Spiderweb’ showed what modern war really looks like and why it’s so important to stay ahead with technology,” he wrote on social media.

Zelensky Agrees to Talks With Russia, After Trump Intervention

Ukrainian president said he would be waiting for Putin at peace talks proposed by the Russian president in Istanbul

By James Marson and Jane Lytvynenko

Updated May 11, 2025 4:33 pm ET

Russian President Vladimir Putin has said Moscow is ready for direct peace talks with Ukraine. PHOTO: GAVRIIL GRIGOROV/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky challenged Vladimir Putin to meet him in Istanbul this week, after President Trump swung behind the Russian president’s offer of talks before a cease-fire.

Zelensky said he would be waiting for Putin in Turkey on Thursday, raising the stakes amid a flurry of diplomatic exchanges and brinkmanship over the weekend where both sides sought to balance not making any significant concessions, with placating Trump, who has demanded an end to the three-year war.

Putin didn’t immediately respond to Zelensky’s offer, which goes beyond the scope of the Russian leader’s suggestion of reviving peace talks among subordinates that petered out in 2022. Putin has repeatedly expressed disdain for Zelensky and questioned his legitimacy.

Trump’s support of the Russian president’s proposal, a switch in his position, had initially appeared to upend European efforts to bring pressure to bear on Russia to halt its war and hand a diplomatic victory to Putin. Putin a day earlier had rebuffed a cease-fire ultimatum from Kyiv and its Western allies,

Ukraine Minerals Deal With U.S.

The United States and Ukraine agreed to a deal that creates an investment fund to search for minerals in Ukraine, and set out how revenues would be split between the countries. Zelensky proposed the deal last year, hoping to improve relations with Trump.

The deal aims to give Trump a personal stake in Ukraine’s fate and to address his concerns that the U.S. has provided Ukraine with a blank check to fight Russia.

The U.S. did not immediately provide details about the agreement, and it was not clear what it meant for the future of American military support for Ukraine.

Despite the fanfare, the deal will have little significance if fighting between Ukraine and Russia persists.

A former official said the agreement would serve the important purpose of building good will with Mr. Trump, and giving him an economic interest in the country’s survival and stability.

Earlier drafts had swiveled between what critics called a brazen extortion of Ukraine by the Trump administration and versions that included points sought by Ukraine, such as references to U.S. support for postwar security guarantees. Without them, Ukraine says, Russia could quickly violate any cease-fire or restart the war after regrouping and rearming.

Mr. Zelensky has made clear that the minerals agreement is not an end in itself. Wrapping up the deal is aimed at clearing the way to more consequential talks on U.S. military backing and on the terms of a possible cease-fire with Russia, he said.

“We see this agreement as a step toward greater security and solid security guarantees, and I truly hope it will work effectively,” Mr. Zelensky said in March in a post on X.

Ukrainian authorities say the country holds deposits of more than 20 critical minerals; one consulting firm valued them as being worth several trillion dollars. But they may not be easy to extract, and the Soviet-era maps outlining where the critical deposits are have never been modernized nor have they all been thoroughly vetted.

Ukraine now earns about $1 billion a year in natural resources royalties, far below the hundreds of billions of dollars Mr. Trump said he expected the United States to gain from the agreement.

Putin Rejects Immediate Cease-Fire in Ukraine. Claims battlefield conditions made a pause good for Ukraine

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Thursday he didn’t support an immediate cease-fire in Ukraine, calling for more discussion on a permanent end to the war as Moscow’s army made rapid gains toward expelling Kyiv’s forces from its Kursk region.

Putin said any pause in fighting at this point would be in Ukraine’s interest because Russia is gaining on the battlefield, and a host of issues would need to be resolved before a cease-fire could be reached.


“The idea itself is good, and we of course support it, but there are questions we have to discuss,” Putin said, referring to a proposed 30-day cease-fire in the war, adding that Russia sought a lasting peace that would need to eliminate the “root causes” of the conflict.

The comments were the first official response from Moscow after Ukraine agreed this week to a U.S.-backed proposal for a pause in the war, now in its fourth year. Putin spoke as President Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, was due in Moscow to discuss the cease-fire proposal, according to two U.S. officials.

Trump said Thursday that he planned to speak with Putin soon and he was pressing for a speedy end to the conflict.

“He put out a very promising statement, but it wasn’t complete,” Trump said of Putin’s comments.

“I’d love to meet with him and talk to him, but we have to get it over with fast,” Trump said, sitting next to NATO secretary-general Mark Rutte. Asked about the continuing talks with Russia, Trump said they were “very serious” and added, “Hopefully they’ll do the right thing.”

Blast on Crimean Bridge Deals Blow to Russian War Effort in Ukraine

 Any impediment to traffic on the bridge could affect Russia’s ability to wage war in southern Ukraine, where Ukraine’s forces have been fighting an increasingly effective counteroffensive.

Ukrainian officials have repeatedly threatened to strike the bridge and some lauded the attack, but Kyiv stopped short of claiming responsibility.

Adam Schreck

Oct 8, 2022, 02:21 AM EDT|Updated 16 hours ago

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — An explosion Saturday caused the partial collapse of a bridge linking the Crimean Peninsula with Russia, damaging an important supply artery for the Kremlin’s faltering war effort in southern Ukraine. Russian authorities said a truck bomb caused the blast, which killed three people.

The speaker of the Russian-backed regional parliament in Crimea immediately accused Ukraine of being behind the explosion; Moscow didn’t apportion blame. Ukrainian officials have repeatedly threatened to strike the bridge and some lauded the destruction, but Kyiv stopped short of claiming responsibility.

The explosion risked a sharp escalation in Russia’s eight-month war, with some Russian lawmakers calling for President Vladimir Putin to declare a “counterterrorism operation” in retaliation, shedding the term “special military operation” that had downplayed the scope of fighting to ordinary Russians.

The Kremlin could use such a move to broaden the power of security agencies, ban rallies, tighten censorship, introduce restrictions on travel, and expand a partial military mobilization that Putin ordered last month.

Hours after the explosion, Russia’s Defense Ministry announced that the air force chief, Gen. Sergei Surovikin, would command all Russian troops in Ukraine. Surovikin, who over the summer was placed in charge of troops in southern Ukraine, had led Russian forces in Syria and was accused of overseeing a brutal bombardment that destroyed much of the city of Aleppo.

Moscow, however, continues to suffer battlefield losses.

On Saturday, a Kremlin-backed official in Ukraine’s Kherson region announced a partial evacuation of civilians from the southern province, one of four illegally annexed by Moscow last week. Kirill Stremousov told Russia’s state-run RIA Novosti agency that young children and their parents, as well as the elderly, could be relocated to two southern Russian regions because Kherson was getting “ready for a difficult period.”

A view shows a fire on the Kerch bridge at sunrise in the Kerch Strait, Crimea.

STRINGER . VIA REUTERS

The 19-kilometer (12-mile) Kerch Bridge, on a strait that connects the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov, is a tangible symbol of Moscow’s claims on Crimea and an essential link to the peninsula, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014. The $3.6 billion bridge, the longest in Europe, is vital to sustaining Russia’s military operations in southern Ukraine. Putin himself presided over the bridge’s opening in 2018.

The attack on it “will have a further sapping effort on Russian morale, (and) will give an extra boost to Ukraine’s,” said James Nixey of Chatham House, a think tank in London. “Conceivably the Russians can rebuild it, but they can’t defend it while losing a war.”

Russia’s National Anti-Terrorism Committee said a truck bomb caused seven railway cars carrying fuel to catch fire, resulting in the “partial collapse of two sections of the bridge.” A man and a woman in a vehicle on the bridge were killed, Russia’s Investigative Committee said. It didn’t say who the third victim was.

All vehicles crossing the bridge are supposed to undergo state-of-the-art checks for explosives. The truck that exploded was owned by a resident of the Krasnodar region, in southern Russia. Russian authorities said the man’s home was searched and experts were looking at the truck’s route.

The Ukrainian postal service announced that it would issue stamps commemorating the blast.

ED RAM VIA GETTY IMAGES

Train and automobile traffic over the bridge was temporarily suspended. Automobile traffic resumed Saturday afternoon on one of the two links that remained intact from the blast, with the flow alternating in each direction, Crimea’s Russia-backed regional leader, Sergey Aksyonov, wrote on Telegram.

Rail traffic was resuming slowly. Two passenger trains departed from the Crimean cities of Sevastopol and Simferopol and headed toward the bridge Saturday evening. Passenger ferry links between Crimea and the Russian mainland were being relaunched Sunday.

While Russia seized areas north of Crimea early during its invasion of Ukraine and built a land corridor to it along the Sea of Azov, Ukraine is pressing a counteroffensive to reclaim those lands.

The Russian Defense Ministry said its troops in the south were receiving necessary supplies through that corridor and by sea. Russia’s Energy Ministry said Crimea has enough fuel for 15 days.

Russian war bloggers responded to the bridge attack with fury, urging Moscow to retaliate by striking Ukrainian civilian infrastructure. Putin ordered the creation of a government panel to deal with the emergency.

Gennady Zyuganov, head of the Russian Communist Party, said the “terror attack” should serve as a wake-up call. “The long-overdue measures haven’t been taken yet, the special operation must be turned into a counterterrorist operation,” he said.

Leonid Slutsky, head of the foreign affairs committee in the Russian parliament’s lower house, said “consequences will be imminent” if Ukraine was responsible. And Sergei Mironov, leader of the Just Russia faction, said Russia should respond by attacking key Ukrainian infrastructure, including power plants, bridges and railways.

Such statements may herald a decision by Putin to declare a counterterrorism operation.

The parliamentary leader of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s party stopped short of claiming that Kyiv was responsible, but appeared to cast the bridge explosion as a consequence of Moscow’s takeover of Crimea.

“Russian illegal construction is starting to fall apart and catch fire. The reason is simple: If you build something explosive, then sooner or later it will explode,” said David Arakhamia of the Servant of the People party.

The Ukrainian postal service announced it would issue stamps commemorating the blast, as it did after the sinking of the Moskva, a Russian flagship cruiser, by a Ukrainian strike.

The secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, Oleksiy Danilov, tweeted a video with the Kerch Bridge on fire and Marilyn Monroe singing her famous “Happy Birthday Mr. President” song. Putin turned 70 on Friday.

In Moscow, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said “the reaction of the Kyiv regime to the destruction of civilian infrastructure shows its terrorist nature.”

The 19-kilometer (12-mile) bridge across the Kerch Strait linking the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov opened in 2018 and is the longest in Europe.

STRINGER . VIA REUTERS

Local authorities in Crimea made conflicting statements about what the damaged bridge would mean for residents. The peninsula is a popular destination for Russian tourists and home to a naval base. A Russian tourist association estimated that 50,000 tourists were in Crimea on vacation on Saturday.

Elsewhere, the U.N. nuclear watchdog said Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant has lost its last remaining external power source as a result of renewed shelling and is now relying on emergency diesel generators.

Ukrainian authorities were also just beginning to sift through the wreckage of the devastated city of Lyman in eastern Ukraine, assessing the humanitarian toll and the possibility of war crimes after a months-long Russian occupation.

The blast on the bridge occurred hours after explosions rocked the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv early Saturday, sending towering plumes of smoke into the sky and triggering secondary explosions. Ukrainian officials accused Russia of pounding Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, with surface-to-air missiles in two largely residential neighborhoods.

Kharkiv resident Tetiana Samoilenko’s apartment caught fire in the attack. She was in the kitchen when the blast struck, sending glass flying.

“Now I have no roof over my head. Now I don’t know what to do next,” the 80-year-old said.

 

Russia's Retreat in Ukraine Pokes Holes in Putin's Projection of Force

Russian President Vladimir Putin gestures as he speaks during a plenary session at the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Russia, Wednesday, Sept. 7, 2022. (Sergei Bobylev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)

Anton Troianovski

Mon, September 12, 2022 at 7:51 AM

In this article:

• 

  Vladimir Putin

  President of Russia

Ukraine’s rout of Russian forces this weekend is creating a new kind of political challenge for President Vladimir Putin: It undercuts the image of competence and might that he has worked for two decades to build.

On Sunday, the Russian military continued to retreat from positions in northeastern Ukraine that it had occupied for months. State television news reports referred to the retreat as a carefully planned “regrouping operation,” praising the heroism and professionalism of Russian troops.

But the upbeat message did little to dampen the anger among supporters of the war over the retreat and the Kremlin’s handling of it. And it hardly obscured the bind that Putin now finds himself in, presiding over a six-month war against an increasingly energized enemy and a Russian populace that does not appear to be prepared for the sacrifices that could come with an escalating conflict.

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“Strength is the only source of Putin’s legitimacy,” Abbas Gallyamov, a former speechwriter for Putin who is now a political consultant living in Israel, said in a phone interview. “And in a situation in which it turns out that he has no strength, his legitimacy will start dropping toward zero.”

As Ukraine pressed its advantage Sunday, seizing towns and territory, Putin escalated the brutality of his campaign, a concession to the pro-war voices on Russian television and social media. Missile strikes on infrastructure across eastern and central Ukraine plunged parts of the country into darkness.

But it was unclear how far Russia — with its cyber, chemical and nuclear arsenals — might be willing to go to halt Ukraine’s momentum, even as the scale of the battlefield setback became clearer and more evidence emerged of disarray inside Russia’s ruling class.

Ramzan Kadyrov, the strongman leader of the Chechnya region in southern Russia that has sent thousands of its own troops to Ukraine, accused the Russian military of making “mistakes” and failing to explain the retreat to the public. Sergei Mironov, the leader of a pro-Putin party in Parliament, criticized the authorities for celebrating Moscow’s annual City Day this weekend, posting on Twitter: “It cannot be and it should not be that our guys are dying today, and we are pretending that nothing is happening!”

“Because of some mistakes unknown to us, control over political processes is being lost,” a pro-Kremlin analyst who often appears on state television, Sergei Markov, said on social media. “I guarantee you that this confusion will not last long. But right now, it’s a mess.”

The fundamental problem, analysts said, is that Putin’s penchant for misleading his own people is catching up to him. The reality of the Russian setback is poking holes in the Kremlin’s message that the Russian army is undefeatable, Ukraine is riddled with corruption and cowardice and Putin is a brilliant geopolitical strategist. It was just last Wednesday that Putin declared that Russia had “not lost anything” as a result of the war, an assertion at odds with Western estimates of tens of thousands of Russian casualties.

For now, the war’s supporters have mainly directed their anger over this weekend’s setbacks at Moscow bureaucrats or at the military leadership. But an early indication that the frustration could damage Putin’s own prestige came on the Telegram social network after Moscow went ahead with a grand fireworks display Saturday evening to mark the 875th anniversary of the city’s founding — a slap in the face to the Russian military, some said, on perhaps the most humiliating day for Russia since the invasion began Feb. 24.

“We won’t support this government in the 2024 elections,” the administrators of a pro-war Telegram account with more than 400,000 followers said, referring to Russia’s next presidential election. “It’s been a long time coming, but this is the last drop.“

The discontent was evident even in Moscow, a city that the authorities have worked to shield from the costs of war.

As Moscow residents celebrated the city’s birthday this weekend with concerts and block parties, Vladislav, a taxi driver who moved to a city near Moscow from the Krasnoyarsk region in Siberia, looked upon all of the celebratory flags and stages with a bit of scorn. He said his 34-year-old cousin had been killed two weeks ago near Donetsk in Ukraine’s Donbas region, after having been conscripted into the pro-Russian forces.

“Here, people are drinking late through the night,” he complained Sunday morning after a weekend of revelry in the city. “No one cares about what is happening on the front.”

Tatiana Stanovaya, a Russian political analyst, said the Kremlin’s decision to play down the intensity and scale of the war in Ukraine had created parallel worlds: the reality of Europe’s biggest land war in generations on the one hand, and the business-as-usual atmosphere in Moscow. on the other.

The strategy to describe the war as a “special military operation” that need not affect most Russians’ daily lives relied on the expectation that Russia would quickly win it, she said. But with setback after setback, the fact that things are not going according to plan is becoming increasingly difficult to hide.

“The Kremlin, in principle, based its entire policy on the idea that there can be no defeats,” she said. “They didn’t prepare for the fact that there could be a collision with this second parallel world.”

There were signs Sunday evening that the Kremlin was responding to the criticism that it was not being honest with the public about the extent of the recent setbacks. On the main weekly news show on state television, the presenter Dmitri Kiselyov described the last week as “probably one of the most difficult” since the start of the war.

“Under the onslaught of superior enemy forces, the allied forces were forced to leave the previously liberated settlements,” Kiselyov said, referring to Russia’s “alliance” with Kremlin-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine.

It was a rare acknowledgment on the airwaves of what pro-Russian military bloggers have been warning about for weeks. With the Kremlin appearing determined to avoid a nationwide draft to increase the ranks of its army, Russia’s forces are outnumbered by the Ukrainians in many parts of the front line.

There were also signs that the Kremlin could be trying to escalate its military campaign, as supporters of the war have long said it should. A Russian strike knocked out power and water Sunday evening to much of the northeastern city of Kharkiv, the city’s mayor said, referring to the attack as an act of “revenge.”

“It seems it’s time to get rough,” the host Vladimir Solovyov said on his state television talk show earlier Sunday, complaining that Russia had not done enough to break Ukraine’s military and fuel supply lines. “It’s just time to get rough.”

How badly this weekend’s battlefield setbacks hurt Putin politically will depend most of all, of course, on his ability to reverse them, while continuing to shelter Russians from the consequences of Western sanctions. This week, Putin is expected to meet with President Xi Jinping of China at a regional summit in Uzbekistan, seeking to expand a critical relationship for Russia as it pursues economic partners outside the West.

Gallyamov, the former speechwriter, said the struggles in Ukraine could lead the elites around the Russian president to push for a successor to be appointed.

“If they continue to destroy the Russian army as actively as they are now,” Gallyamov said of Ukraine’s forces, “then all this can accelerate even faster.”