Behind enemy lines

Tensions rose as long-range missiles flew from and into Russia last week. But in truth, the west has been under attack from hybrid warfare since the Ukraine invasion began

- Simon Tisdall

THE UNPRECEDENTED FIRING by Ukrainian forces of British-made long-range Storm Shadow missiles at military targets inside Russia last week means the UK, along with the US, is now viewed by Moscow as a legitimate target for punitive, possibly violent retaliation.

In a significant escalation in response to the missile launches, Vladimir Putin confirmed that, for the first time in the war, Russia had fired an intermediate-range ballistic missile, targeting the Ukrainian city of Dnipro. Putin also said Russia now believed it had the "right" to attack "military facilities" in countries that supply Kyiv with long-range weapons.

Yet in truth, Britain and its allies have been under constant Russian attack since the war began. Using sabotage, arson, deniable cyber-attacks and aggressive and passive forms of covert "hybrid" and "cognitive" warfare, Putin has tried to impose a high cost for western support of Ukraine.

This largely silent struggle does not yet amount to a conventional military conflict between Nato and its former Soviet adversary. But in an echo of Cuba in 1962, the "Ukraine missile crisis" - fought on land, air and in the dark-web alleyways and byways of a digitised world-points ominously in that direction.

Concern that Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine would trigger a wider war has preoccupied western politicians and military planners from the start. The US, UK and EU armed and bankrolled Kyiv and placed unprecedented, punitive sanctions on Moscow.

But the US president, Joe Biden, remained cautious. His primary aim was to contain the conflict. So the convenient fiction developed that the west was not fighting Russia but, rather, helping a sovereign Ukraine defend itself. That illusion was never shared by Moscow.