🚀 I just published a new Missile Matters post on what Ukraine's deep-strike campaign has done to the Ukrainian state itself.

Between 18 and 24 July, Ukrainian drones struck several Wildberries logistics hubs, with Russian analysts estimating the economic damage at up to 1.3 billion USD. The attritional logic of Ukraine's expanding deep-strike campaign is familiar.

The constitutive effect is less discussed.Charles Tilly famously argued that war made the state and the state made war.

Developments in Ukraine suggest a contemporary variant: the state makes the missile, and the missile makes the state. Sovereign deep strike at this scale confers what Schelling called the power to hurt, and a state that can hold an adversary's economy at risk at will occupies a different category of actorhood in the international system.

Ukraine has turned from a coerced state into a coercing one. Ukraine’s deep-strike campaign cuts directly against the Russian society’s image of itself as powerful, protected, and untouchable, and against its sense of superiority in relation to others, particularly Ukraine.

Whenever serious negotiations between Russia and Ukraine over the end of the war and a post-war order start, the figurative "missile" will be on the table, and Russia will negotiate with the Ukrainian state the missile made.