Simplicius:
There’s an argument to be made for the fact that Zelensky and his cronies not only expected a reprisal, but intentionally provoked it. After all, the attack on the Starobelsk dorm was not an “accident”—it’s said that four separate drones accurately slammed into the building, cratering it.
Kiev is in dire straits and requires escalation at all costs in accelerationist fashion, even if that escalation appears to threaten its very existence. This is because the cost-benefit analysis seems to still favor Ukraine, as Zelensky perhaps rightly calculates that Putin will continue to mostly do show strikes for now, but with increasingly fearsome systems that could be presented in Western press as harrowing and existential-level attacks on ‘Europe’. These information campaigns would be used to galvanize more support, funding, terrify European citizens into permitting their leaders to drain their country’s treasuries for war against Russia.
https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/oreshnik-shocks-ukrainian-capital
Zelensky loves major Russian attacks because they do not harm him, and each one presents a new opportunity to cry foul about civilian deaths or the destruction of civilian enterprises—it’s likely the whole reason behind all Ukraine’s provocations and “long range attacks” against Russia: to throw Russia off-balance, and cost it to “tilt” to Ukraine’s favor.
