The Ukrainian drone operation mounted against St. Petersburg on the night of October 17-18 has revived an awkward question that the Baltic governments and Helsinki have preferred to leave unexamined, which is whether such a large attacking force could possibly have reached its objectives without crossing NATO airspace.

Russian sources put the number of drones involved at roughly five hundred, and Moscow’s air defences were evidently braced for an assault on the capital, only for the formation to alter direction and send a substantial contingent towards St. Petersburg, whose defensive cover is plainly thinner than Moscow’s.

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Beyond the feint itself, the route the drones flew deserves attention, because it defies belief that a swarm of that size could have appeared over St. Petersburg without traversing the airspace of the Baltic states and very probably Finland too. Those governments have occasionally denied that any such transit takes place, and President Alexander Stubb of Finland has struck the same note, yet the Baltic capitals and Helsinki have simultaneously been among the loudest voices condemning Russian drone incursions into their own airspace, a grievance that has served as a centrepiece of the hybrid war narrative cultivated in recent months.

As to what the raid achieved, the drones did get through to St. Petersburg and while nothing indicates that anything in the historic Tsarist centre was struck, several sites were hit, including a data centre run by VKontakte, the firm habitually compared to Facebook, an electricity substation, an oil terminal described as the largest on the Baltic and a warehousebelonging to the Ozon e-commerce group with debris beign reported to have fallen on residential buildings and set fires and ten people are said to have been hurt.

The assessment here is that on this occasion scores, perhaps hundreds, of drones came at St. Petersburg across Baltic and Finnish territory, and that this did at least as much to deceive the city’s defenders as the Ukrainian ruse of appearing to head for Moscow. This airspace question was explored at greater length in an earlier article, “How Likely Is It That Russia Attacks States Allowing Ukrainian Drones To Use Their Airspace To Target It?”, which interested readers may read for background.

Russian warnings on precisely this point of Baltic and Finnish airspace predate the St. Petersburg raid of course. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov cautioned in April that reports of Ukrainian drones using the airspace of NATO states to strike Russian territory represented another breach of Moscow’s red lines, adding that while patience was a Russian virtue it was not inexhaustible and that the exact location of those red lines would remain deliberately undefined as a deterrent in itself. Following the raid, Russian drone expert Dmitry Kuzyakin stated that the Baltic states had at a minimum permitted their airspace to be used for the drones’ flight and did not exclude the possibility that one of them had provided a launch site, arguing that Russia could respond by intercepting drones over Baltic and Finnish territory and, if launches from those territories were confirmed, by destroying the preparation and launch sites themselves.

The Kremlin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said only that Russia’s strikes are systematic and massive and aimed at diminishing Kyiv’s offensive potential, but Peskov has previously warned that if airspace is granted for hostile activity against Russia, Moscow will draw the appropriate conclusions and take the appropriate measures. The likely trajectory, therefore, is not an immediate overt strike on NATO territory but a combination of intensified interception efforts closer to the Russian border, continued general retaliation against Ukrainian infrastructure and a sustained diplomatic campaign designed to put the Baltic capitals and Helsinki on notice that their airspace is now regarded as part of the battlefield.

The Trump-Zelensky Quarrel

The drone campaign also apparently antagonises Donald Trump, who only days ago pressed Zelensky to halt strikes on Russian refineries and energy infrastructure and who even proclaimed an energy ceasefire, only to be met with a barrage of insults from Zelensky, who at points seemed to hint that Ukraine’s refinery campaign was being suspended and yet strikes have now landed on refineries at Saratov and Ryazan, the latter unquestionably inflicting damage, followed by this assault on the St. Petersburg oil storage site. Read another way, the whole exchange looks less like a genuine rupture than like one more manoeuvre in the US-EU coalition’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, since a visible quarrel allows the coalition to portray the escalation as the independent initiative of a sovereign partner rather than the product of Western direction, keeps the strikes on Russian energy infrastructure coming while Washington maintains a posture of seeking restraint and leaves Trump free to present himself as the peacemaker whose advice was spurned.

Taken at face value, the Ukrainian leader has cocked a snook at the US president and a client state appears to be bullying its patron, which is demeaning for Washington. Yet no comment has been forthcoming from Trump on the latest strike and the contrast with a year ago, when he was cheerleading for Ukraine’s drone campaign and urging Zelensky in a summer telephone call to rain missiles and drones on Moscow, is hard to reconcile with the present theatrics of estrangement. That sudden change from past enthusiasm and current indignation invites the suspicion that the falling-out is manufactured rather than real, a device that preserves the coalition’s deniability, keeps the proxy war running beneath a veneer of allied disagreement and leaves the Russians negotiating with a US president whose authority over his own proxies appears, on the surface at least, to have evaporated.

US press reporting suggests he loosened restrictions on satellite intelligence sharing with Ukraine so its drone operations could be pursued with greater intensity, evidently persuaded of their worth and much of thebitterness between Trump and Zelensky appears to derive from Trump’s conviction that he was duped, that Zelensky and perhaps others in the US government led him up the garden path into endorsing a drone campaign sold to him as a winner but which has proved an exceedingly costly failure.

These mutual recriminations, however, may amount to little more than public relations manoeuvres by which both men manufacture alibis for themselves, since each needs a way to explain away a war that is being lost against Russia and a well-publicised falling-out serves that purpose neatly for Trump by distancing him from a failed campaign and for Zelensky by casting him as the victim of US promises rather than the author of his own defeats.

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Miguel Santos García is a Puerto Rican writer and political analyst who mainly writes about the geopolitics of neocolonial conflicts and Hybrid Wars within the 4th Industrial Revolution, the ongoing New Cold War and the transition towards multipolarity.

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