Russia’s Panic Is Now Public

Ukraine’s Deep Drone Strikes Shatter the Kremlin’s Last Illusions of Safety

During this first week of July 2025, Ukraine proved that Vladimir Putin’s regime cannot protect itself—even inside the very heart of Russia.

Late on July 6th, waves of Ukrainian drones penetrated nearly a thousand kilometers into European Russia.¹ They struck targets once thought untouchable: military facilities, transport hubs, and factories essential to Russia’s war machine.¹² By dawn, the consequences were cascading across the country.

Air raid sirens blared in cities that had never heard them before.² Airports were thrown into chaos. Sheremetyevo—Moscow’s main international gateway—suspended operations, grounding over 45,000 passengers.³ From St. Petersburg to Nizhny Novgorod, departure boards glowed red with “Delayed” and “Cancelled.”³

From a drone strike, in May 2025, where over 60,000 passengers were grounded.

For the first time since World War II, Russia’s civilian population in the heartland of the nation experienced war on their own soil, not just in the abstract. This wasn’t a one-off. It was the culmination of a systematic campaign that had been escalating for months—and the clearest signal yet that no Russian region is immune.

This moment was inevitable. A regime built on fear and propaganda cannot endure the reality that its enemies can strike, repeatedly and predictably, inside what it once called its “safe rear.”

See the video presentation of this article, above, on YouTube.

The Illusion of Distance Has Collapsed

When you measure the scale of these attacks, the numbers speak volumes. Over 485 flights were canceled in a matter of hours, with 1,900 more delayed or diverted. More than 7,000 passengers were stranded in St. Petersburg alone. By July’s end, Russia had recorded at least 217 airspace closures this year—more than in 2023 and 2024 combined.³

This is no longer a symbolic disruption. The drone campaign is targeting both military and civilian infrastructure across a territory that stretches wider than Western Europe. No region, from the Volga to the Arctic, has been spared the shock.

The operational impact is real: Engels Air Base, home to nuclear-capable bombers, has been forced onto permanent alert status. Factories producing cruise missile components have been destroyed more than 1,000 kilometers from the front. Fresh food shipments are spoiling in grounded cargo planes. Industrial parts critical to keeping Russian military logistics afloat are sitting in warehouses because airports cannot guarantee safe passage.

For ordinary Russians—especially the roughly 50% of Moscow and St. Petersburg residents who hold passports—the war has arrived in their daily lives. No traveler is ignorant of the fact that drones are now more likely to cancel their flight than winter weather.

And for the elites who thought they could simply fly away, the shock was worse. This campaign has trapped oligarchs and senior officials on the tarmac in their private jets—unable to do business, to flee, or to insulate themselves from the consequences of a war they helped start.⁴

A Regime at War with Itself

Instead of offering a credible plan to protect the country, the Kremlin defaulted to its oldest reflexes: repression and scapegoating. Entire regions were cut off from the internet, including areas nowhere near Ukraine. Telegram and WhatsApp were jammed to keep citizens from sharing videos of grounded flights and panicked crowds.¹

When that failed to suppress the humiliation, the purges and sudden deaths began. Today, on July 7, 2025, Russia’s Investigative Committee confirmed that Roman Starovoit—earlier today dismissed as Transport Minister—was found dead in his car with a gunshot wound. Officials stated that suicide was the primary version under investigation. According to reporting compiled by Meduza, Telegram channels including 112 and Shot claimed he drove to Malevich Park near Moscow and shot himself with his personal Makarov pistol inside a Tesla. Kommersant reported that Starovoit had been under criminal investigation for alleged theft of over a billion rubles allocated for building defensive structures on the Ukrainian border in Kursk… The region Ukraine succesfully invaded and occupied.

What has now come out was the the former Minister “killed himself” a full day before he was dismissed from his position as minister.

Earlier this week, billionaire Konstantin Strukov—once decorated by Putin himself and a member of Putin’s Party—was banned from flying out of Yekaterinburg as prosecutors prepared charges that could seize part of his fortune. Russian Telegram reports that he was seeking to flee to Turkey - and Russian authorities have announced they are seeking to nationalize 100% of his gold company - the third largest producer of gold in Russia… Indicative of how cash strapped the Kremlin has become.

These are not routine bureaucratic reshuffles. They are signals—brutal and unmistakable—that no one in Putin’s circle is safe. The regime has turned its paranoia inward, cannibalizing the very elites it relies upon to sustain itself.

The Strategic Consequences

This is where too many Western observers stop short: noting the chaos but missing what it means.

These strikes are not random acts of harassment. They are a deliberate, systematic campaign designed to:

• Exhaust Russian air defenses across thousands of kilometers.

• Undermine the myth that Moscow can protect its people.

• Disrupt military readiness by forcing constant dispersal of bombers, aircraft crews, and logistics.

It is working. Three and a half years after launching a war of conquest, the Russian state can no longer credibly claim air superiority—even within its own borders.

This is the kind of fracture that doesn’t just demoralize a population—it destabilizes a system. And every oligarch, every senior official, every executive stuck for hours in a grounded plane knows it.

The War Is No Longer Elsewhere

This is the strategic reality: no Russian city, no military base, and no civilian airport is beyond reach. The illusion of distance has been erased.

The war is no longer something Russians can pretend is happening far away. It is here.

And as someone who has spent 20 years studying authoritarian regimes—who was banned from Russia for life in 2010 precisely because I have spent my career exposing Putin’s system—I can tell you this: the Putin regime has never been this vulnerable.

When repression is the only answer, when paranoia becomes the daily operating principle, collapse stops being a question of “if” and becomes a matter of “when.”¹

This is what the beginning of the end of the Putin system looks like.

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Footnotes

¹ https://www.econotimes.com/Russia-Downs-120-Ukrainian-Drones-Amid-Ongoing-Cross-Border-Strikes-1715241
² https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/ukrainian-drone-strikes-russian-plant-after-record-russian-123366038
³ https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-airport-disruption-ukraine-drones-zelenskyy-trump/33465530.html
⁴ https://iz.ru/en/1916152/2025-07-05/russian-billionaire-konstantin-strukov-was-banned-flying-yekaterinburg
⁵ https://t.me/meduzalive
⁶ https://rtvi.com/news/kartapolov-podtverdil-smert-eks-glavy-mintransa-starovoita/
⁷ https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/6724189
⁸ https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/former-russian-deputy-defence-minister-is-sentenced-13-years-corruption-tass-2025-07-01/
⁹ https://apnews.com/article/3597dae5523387892b851d71ddd22819