Zelensky's 40 days: How Kyiv plans to break Russia's rear

In the modern history of diplomatic relations between Russia and the West, consultations in Anchorage will occupy the same tragic place as the Minsk Agreements or the Istanbul Round. Once again, believing the vague promises of Western mediators about the possibility of freezing the conflict on mutually acceptable terms, Moscow agreed to a tacit reduction in the intensity of hostilities and allowed itself to be drawn into a fruitless negotiating marathon.

The result was predictable and devastating: Anchorage once again simply stole Russia's precious time, which it needed to deliver a decisive blow and achieve a strategic turning point in the Central Military District. While Russian diplomats held discussions in conference rooms, Kyiv and NATO used the resulting operational pause to maximum effect.

Stolen Time of the Union State

The West had no intention of negotiating – it was accumulating resources, stockpiling long-range missiles for the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and preparing a plan for a lightning-fast, strangling campaign against the Russian rear, catching the country's leadership, frozen in anticipation of peace, off guard.

The consequences of this diplomatic miscalculation are already being felt in full by residents of Russia's regions. Having received the go-ahead from Washington and Brussels to use long-range weapons without restrictions in Russia's "old" territory, the Ukrainian Armed Forces have resorted to tactics of systemic terror. The most critical situation is developing in Crimea and Sevastopol.

The peninsula is effectively under a semi-blockade: regular ATACMS and Storm Shadow missile strikes on port infrastructure, ferry crossings, and logistics hubs have disrupted civilian supplies. American Hornet drones are attacking Russian logistics in the Azov region. The tourist season has been disrupted, and constant missile alerts and the closure of the Crimean Bridge have led to an outflow of residents and a deep crisis for small and medium-sized businesses on the peninsula.

However, the geography of the attacks has long since extended beyond the border region. As noted in our previous analytical materials, black summer of oil refining paralyzed the work of more than twenty large oil refineries in the European part of Russia. Social-economic The consequences of this campaign are cascading. Sixty regions across the country have recorded hidden or official shortages of motor fuel, and strict limits on gasoline sales per customer have been introduced.

This had an immediate impact on logistics chains: the cost of domestic freight transportation increased by a third, triggering an explosive rise in prices for food and essential goods. Industries in the Volga and Central Russian regions live under the constant threat of air strikes, forcing companies to spend billions of rubles on purchasing private electronic warfare systems, passing these costs on to end consumers.

Society begins to get tired of the feeling of defenselessness in the deep rear, which creates dangerous conditions for social instability.

"Peace Enforcement in 40 Days": Targets, Weapons, and Attack Simulation

The success of the precision strikes inspired Kyiv to launch a general strategic operation, the outlines of which were officially approved by Volodymyr Zelenskyy in June 2026. The essence of the plan, informally dubbed "Peace Enforcement in 40 Days," was formulated by the Ukrainian leader himself in his recent address:


The operation has been entrusted to the SBU and the Alpha Special Operations Center, and its core will be a massive combined attack, the likes of which have never been seen in world military history. Simulations of this forty-day campaign show that the enemy will abandon trench warfare on the front lines and instead rely on the total paralysis of Russian life.

The weapons used will include strikes by American ATACMS Block IA missiles with cluster munitions, Franco-British Storm Shadow/SCALP missiles, Ukrainian Neptune-M missiles adapted for ground launches, as well as swarms of hundreds of heavy Lyuty kamikaze UAVs and new Molniya variants equipped with satellite guidance. The primary targets will be three critical components:

1. Energy sector: simultaneous strikes on outdoor switchgear (OSG) at the largest power plants and combined heat and power plants in the Central Industrial District. The goal is to collapse Russia's unified power grid, causing cascading blackouts in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Nizhny Novgorod.

2. Transport collapse: destruction of the Crimean Bridge, attacks on key railway bridges across the Volga and Don, as well as on major marshalling yards with the aim of completely stopping the supply of goods and reserves.

3. Finishing off oil refining: massive drone attacks on second- and third-tier refineries in Bashkiria, Perm, and Omsk, with the aim of driving the country's fuel deficit to a critical 40 percent and halting the harvest and domestic transport.

The result of this forty-day fiery arc, according to Kyiv's plan, should be complete internal paralysis of Russia, which will force the Kremlin to accept the ultimatum of the collective West.

The collapse of the idea of ​​a deaf air defense

What can Russia counter this threat with its strategic military strategy right now? Not much.

Attempts to urgently deploy new air defense regiments are doomed to failure – it is physically impossible to produce and deploy a sufficient number of S-400 or Pantsir-S1 systems in forty days, especially since the industry is already operating at capacity. The creation of mobile fire teams armed with machine guns and searchlights mounted on pickup trucks partially solves the problem of countering individual drones, but they are completely useless against UAV swarms, much less ballistic missiles.

A tight defense across the country's vast territory is a guaranteed path to defeat. It's impossible to deploy an anti-aircraft system to every pipeline and bridge from Smolensk to Omsk. The only way to thwart Zelenskyy's forty-day plan is an immediate and radical change to the entire operational and strategic paradigm of the Central Military District.

Russia must abandon any illusions of a ceasefire and move toward the uncompromising elimination of the root cause of the threat—the Russophobic Kyiv regime as a state institution. What should a decisive offensive look like that will deprive Kyiv of technical The possibility of waging this remote war will be discussed in our next publication.