Ukrainian Army Reserve Colonel Serhiy Hrabski told public broadcaster Polskie Radio that the recent Oreshnik strike in the Lviv area near the Polish border, showed how little margin for error exists when Russia fires long-range weapons toward western Ukraine.
“If the calculations were less precise, the Oreshnik could have hit Polish territory,” Hrabski said, naming the southeastern Polish cities of Przemyśl and Rzeszów as possible locations in a worst-case scenario.
Hrabski described the attack as part of a broader pattern of consistent Russian escalation during deep winter cold, when retaining a functioning energy infrastructure becomes a matter of survival.
With nighttime temperatures in parts of Ukraine falling to minus 17 degrees Celsius and lower, he said Russia has intensified strikes on power and heating facilities to leave civilians without light and warmth.
He argued that Moscow has turned to what he called deliberate terror against civilians because it has long failed to achieve a strategic breakthrough on the battlefield.
"Shelling cities is a war crime," he said, adding that Russia has repeatedly hit places such as Odesa and the industrial regions around Dnipro and Zaporizhzhia.
Hrabski used the term “Aleppization” to describe Russia’s approach, a reference to Aleppo in Syria, where Russian and Syrian regime forces laid waste to large parts of the city during the country's civil war.
In Ukraine, he said, Russia is trying to grind urban areas down through repeated bombardment.
He said Ukraine’s air defenses have limited the damage in recent mass attacks, claiming that more than 80 percent of incoming aerial targets aimed at Kyiv were shot down in the latest large barrage.
Without those interceptions, he said, the capital would have faced “a real hell, a cold hell,” in the middle of winter.
Hrabski warned that the danger extends beyond Ukraine, arguing that Europe is already facing what he called a form of hybrid war, a mix of pressure and disruption that can include intimidation, sabotage, and destabilization that stops short of an open invasion.
He said Russia is testing the West’s reactions and preparing for a wider confrontation, even if a full-scale global war “hot phase” has not begun.
He also framed Russia’s campaign in openly imperial terms, saying the Kremlin is targeting whole nations rather than specific governments.
“Russia is not fighting a ‘criminal Kyiv regime,’ as they call it, it is fighting the nation of Ukraine,” he said, adding that Moscow historically cast Poles as a central enemy of the Russian Empire and is again seeking to destroy states it labels hostile.
As an example of the brutality he attributes to Russian strategy, Hrabski recounted an interrogation of a captured Russian pilot in southern Ukraine.
Asked why he shot up a settlement where he could clearly see there were no military targets, Hrabski said the pilot shrugged and replied calmly: “We have orders to erase you as a nation.”
Hrabski argued that Russia does not currently have the capacity to deliver a single blow that would topple Ukraine and threaten Europe at once, as much as it would like to do so.
He warned, however, that the scale of Russian firepower should still serve as a wake-up call, and suggested we ought to view the current state of hostilities as "World War II-and-a half."
He said available statistics indicate Russia launched more than 55,000 aerial targets at Ukraine last year, a level of sustained attack that would severely test any country’s air defenses.
On the ground, Hrabski said the front line remains highly active, with heavy fighting continuing in multiple sectors, including around Kupiansk in the Kharkiv region and pressure points near Zaporizhzhia.
He said Russia is using aircraft on a large scale, claiming that weeks without at least 1,000 aerial bombs dropped have become rare.
Hrabski has frequently commented on the war in Ukraine for Polish media, and has previously warned that Russia could seek to expand the war’s geography.
In a March 2025 interview with Polish Radio, he said the Kremlin could eye the Suwalki Gap, the narrow stretch of land linking Poland and Lithuania that serves as NATO’s main land corridor to the Baltic states, between Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave and Belarus, Moscow’s close ally.
(rt/gs)
Source: polskieradio24.pl