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By Patrick Lawrence / Consortium News
Sometimes wars have occasions that can be read — immediately, soon or in time — as turning points, clarifying moments. D–Day, June 6, 1944, is an obvious case: The Allies and the Red Army were in Berlin less than a year later.
The Tet Offensive, which began 58 years ago next week (Can you believe it?), is another: All the victory-is-near illusions the American command had cultivated for years collapsed. There were many more casualties at the altar of imperial delusion, but the war in Southeast Asia was on the way to over.
On Jan. 8 Russia attacked Lviv, the city in western Ukraine, with an Oreshnik missile. To me this looks very like a clarifying event in the Ukraine war — Moscow’s announcement that it has decided to begin the beginning of the end.
The Oreshnik is a new-generation weapon that already wears a little of the mystique of Ares, the Greek god of war. It travels at hypersonic speeds and is undetectable by air-defense systems. It is capable of carrying nuclear warheads, although the missile that hit Lviv wasn’t armed with one.
This was not Russia’s first use of the Oreshnik in Ukraine. Its first was in November 2024, when the target was a munitions factory in Dnipro, not far from the front lines. That blew minds as well as production lines.
But the missile that hit Lviv seemed to have more to say to the regime in Kiev and its Western backers, notably all those supercilious Europeans. Lviv, Ukraine’s cultural capital, has been a safe haven these past four years of conflict. Not to be missed, it lies roughly 45 miles from the border with Poland.
Russia’s declared intent in launching its second Oreshnik was to respond to the Dec. 29 drone attack the Ukrainians, with the usual assistance of the Americans and Brits, launched on President Vladimir Putin’s secondary residence in Valdai, northwest of Moscow.
Parenthetically, Kiev and the C.I.A., two famous truth-tellers, deny any such attack took place, but let us not waste any time with this silliness. The Russians have reportedly presented Western officials with evidence of the event.
Would Putin raise it in a telephone exchange with President Trump were it, as corporate media now have it, just another disinformation operation?
These things said, the Oreshnik hit in Lviv merits a broader reading, in my view.
Here is an account of the Oreshnik as it descended through the winter clouds above Lviv. It is written by Mike Mihajlovic, who publishes, edits and writes frequently for Black Mountain Analysis, a Substack newsletter I have found worth looking at on previous occasions.
This passage is based on Mihajlovic’s apparently diligent study of digital evidence and eyewitness accounts. Good enough we know what happens when these things arrive, as there may be more of them in the skies above Ukraine as the war begins its fifth year:
“As the hypersonic penetrators broke through the cloud layers, each was enveloped in a luminous plasma sheath, producing brief but violent flashes that momentarily illuminated the surrounding atmosphere. These flashes were not explosions in the conventional sense, but visual signatures of extreme velocity, friction, and compression as the warheads tore through dense air at hypersonic speed.
Observers on the ground reported an unsettling soundscape that followed the visual phenomenon. Rather than a single detonation, there were sharp, cracking noises that seemed to ripple across the terrain, as if the ground itself were fracturing under stress….
What made the event particularly striking was the setting. The impacts occurred against the backdrop of an idyllic winter landscape: fields and forests blanketed in snow, small settlements dimly lit, and a horizon that, moments earlier, conveyed calm and stillness.
Against this muted palette, the light generated by the strike stood out with almost surreal intensity. Reflections danced across the snow, briefly turning the ground into a mirror that amplified the event’s brightness. Witnesses described the glow as unnatural, a cold, shimmering illumination that lingered just long enough to be noticed and remembered.”
Perfect as a description of a nation entertaining its own set of illusions and delusions as, with the unconscionable encouragement of the Three Musketeers — the British, French and German leadership — it prolongs a war it lost long ago. Let’s call it shock therapy for the complacent.
The Lviv attack seems to be part of an intensifying campaign to cripple Ukraine’s power grids, energy infrastructure and productive capacity. The Russians have been hitting such targets for years, of course, but these new operations suggest Moscow is after the endgame now.
Moscow’s Attempts to End Conflict
The Kremlin has tried every which way to bring its “special military operation,” along with its broader confrontation with the West, to a mutually beneficial conclusion. You can go back to the spring of 2022, when was ready to sign an accord with Kiev a few months into the war — only for the Brits, with American consent, to scotch it.
Or December 2021, when it sent Washington and NATO draft treaties as a basis of negotiating a new security framework between the Russian Federation and the West. They were dismissed as “nonstarters,” a British-ism the Biden regime thought was clever.
Or the Minsk Protocols, September 2014 and February 2015, which the British and French sabotaged. Or back to the early 1990s, when Michail Gorbachev hoped to bring post–Soviet Russia into “a common European home.”
The Kremlin has proven exceptionally restrained, not to say forebearing, through all of this. And it would be a mistake now to conclude the Russians have lost their patience.
No, in my read they have simply concluded there is no point waiting around while the Western powers indulge themselves in pantomime statecraft or — maybe better put —some kind of group onanism they seem to find satisfying.
And in public, no less.
For weeks toward the end of last year we read incessantly of the intense diplomatic work Kiev, the Europeans and the Trump regime’s contingent were getting up to. The swashbuckling Musketeers cooked up a 20–point peace plan that was supposed to supersede Trump’s 28–point document.
Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s unconstitutional president, went from one European capital to another and then to Washington and then to Mar-a–Lago and then back to Europe, all along asserting he and his backers were “90 percent there.”
Ninety percent there on security guarantees providing for European troops to serve as peacekeepers on Ukrainian soil. Ninety percent there on a territorial settlement. And so on.
You watched all this with your jaw dropping. None of it had anything to do with fashioning an accord Moscow would find even preliminarily negotiable. The 20–point plan’s intent, indeed, was to subvert the 28–point plan, the first pieces of paper since the spring 2022 attempt that Moscow appeared to find worth its time.
Not Enough Delusion
No, the Trump plan was too realistic as a draft of a settlement accord in recognizing that Moscow was the victor in its war with Ukraine, Kiev the vanquished. There wasn’t enough delusion in it.
And now, roughly since the start of the year, more or less complete silence from Zelensky and the Musketeers — Kier Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz, a prime minister, a president and a chancellor.
There is no establishing any certain causality between the Oreshnik attack in previously safe — relatively speaking — western Ukraine, and this nothing-to-say lapse in Kiev, London, Paris and Berlin (and for that matter Washington). But the point may prove the same.
The Europeans have run out of postures and gestures in the way of performative statecraft: This is my conclusion. And the Russians, evidently sharing it in one or another form, see no point in indulging them any further.
As to the Trumpster, it seemed to me unimaginable from the outset that the national security state in all its appendages would ever allow him to reach a comprehensive settlement with Moscow that would open into a new era in East–West relations.
So has the war turned. So do matters clarify. So does the war in Ukraine appear set to end — not with a single detonation, no, rather with sharp cracking noises that seemed to ripple across the terrain.
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Patrick Lawrence
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a media critic, essayist, author and lecturer. His new book, Journalists and Their Shadows, is out now from Clarity Press. His website is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site.