https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/09/11/tjns-s11.html
Ukraine launched its largest wave of drone attacks deep inside Russia Monday night, including a deadly attack on the capital city of Moscow.
The site of the damaged multi-storey residential building following a Ukrainian drone attack in Ramenskoye, outside Moscow, Moscow region, Russia, on Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024 [AP Photo/Moscow Region Governor Andrei Vorobyev official Telegram channel]
The wave of drone attacks killed one person, injured six others, and forced Moscow’s airports to temporarily close. It was the first time a Ukrainian attack on the Russian capital city has killed someone.
Russian authorities claimed they shot down 144 drones, spread across the regions of Bryansk, Kursk, and Moscow. Moscow authorities claimed that 20 drones were shot down across the region surrounding the city.
In the suburb of Ramenskoye, at least two apartment buildings were hit with drones. A 46-year-old woman was killed in her apartment, while eight others were injured. Forty-three people were moved to emergency housing.
Sergey Sobyanin, the Mayor of Moscow, said a fire had broken out at Zhukovsky airfield.
The assault on Moscow takes place as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is traveling to Kyiv, Ukraine, this week, during which he is expected to announce the end of all remaining restrictions on Ukraine using NATO weapons to strike deep inside Russia.
Juliegrace Brufke, a reporter with Axios, quoted House Foreign Affairs Chairman Michael McCaul as telling her in an interview, “I talked to Blinken two days ago, and he is traveling with his counterpart from the UK to Kyiv to basically tell them that they will allow them” to hit Russia with ATACMS long-range missiles.
Separately, the British Telegraph reported that “Antony Blinken, Mr. Biden’s secretary of state, is due in Ukraine on Wednesday with David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary, to discuss lifting restrictions with Volodymyr Zelensky. Mr. Biden and Sir Keir Starmer would then discuss changing the policy in a White House summit on Friday.”
As with previous US/NATO escalations against Russia, a nuclear-armed state, this one is being preceded with the obligatory “demands” by members of Congress, allowing the media to present Biden as having given in to “pressure” from Congress.
On Monday, a group of leading House Republicans published a letter to President Biden calling for the lifting of all remaining restrictions on the use of NATO-provided weapons from Ukraine.
The letter demanded, “We write to urge you to lift the remaining restrictions on Ukraine’s use of U.S.-provided long-range systems, specifically Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS), against legitimate military targets deeper inside Russia.” It added, “Your decision earlier this year to partially lift the total ban on Ukrainian strikes on targets in Russia with U.S.-provided weapons was welcome but came too late.”
The letter declared that “concerns about escalation” have been “consistently invalidated since Day One of the war.”
It asserted, “Neither Ukraine’s use of U.S.-provided weapons in Russia nor its military incursion into Russia’s Kursk region – the first foreign occupation of Russian territory since World War II – has triggered a Russian escalatory response.”
That is, having crossed one “red line” after another, without starting a full-scale nuclear war, the leading figures of US imperialism are proposing to send US-made missiles raining down on the Russian capital city, claiming that this will not lead to Russia sending its own missiles against the capitals of NATO.
The escalation of the US war against Russia is being increasingly intertwined with the US-led imperialist escalation throughout the Middle East centered on the Gaza genocide.
While in the UK, Blinken announced a new series of sanctions against Iran, including restrictions on the ability of Iran’s national carrier Iran Air to carry out direct flights to Europe.
Blinken claimed that the sanctions were in response to allegations that Iran had provided Russia with short-range missiles for use in the Ukraine war.
“We’ve warned Tehran publicly, we’ve warned Tehran privately that taking this step would constitute a dramatic escalation,” Blinken said Tuesday. “Russia has now received shipments of these missiles.”
The moves to end all remaining restrictions on strikes by US/NATO weapons inside of Russia follows the conclusion of the NATO summit in Washington two months ago, which took a series of far-reaching steps to expand the direct involvement of NATO in the war.
Most significantly, it announced the creation of an office inside Ukraine and the establishment of a NATO command in Germany, led by a three-star general, to oversee the war against Russia.
The NATO summit was followed just one month later by the start of Ukraine’s offensive against Kursk, in which NATO armored vehicles and tanks are directly rolling over Russia’s borders, in what was the most provocative escalation by NATO to date.
In her speech at the Democratic National Convention, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris vowed to escalate the war with Russia, declaring, “And as president, I will stand strong with Ukraine and our NATO allies.” The Democratic Party platform is pledged to massively expand and modernize the US nuclear arsenal.
With just two months to go before the 2024 US presidential election, the massive and rapid escalation of the war against Russia serves to create “facts on the ground,” tending toward an even further expansion of the US war with Russia.
In a statement on X, Joe Kishore, the Socialist Equality Party’s candidate for president, noted, “In the final two months before the election, the Biden-Harris administration is implementing a major escalation of the US-NATO war against Russia, entirely behind the backs of the American population.”