Ukraine Just Sparked a Panic in the Russian Arctic

But it gets even more interesting than that.

This specific region that Ukraine hit, the Yamalo-Nanets region, though sparsely populated, is crucial to Russia's entire national strategy.

It accounts for roughly 80% of all of Russia's natural gas production, and also produces diesel explicitly for the use of the Russian military.

It's a critical and now apparently vulnerable target.

Because with these initial concept-proving strikes Ukraine has now conducted here, they've confirmed that the infrastructure of essentially this entire region is now well within range, with very little, if any, Russian air defenses available to intercept follow-up attacks.

So once the winter freezes arrive, it's not inconceivable at all that Ukraine could ramp things up dramatically.

And the production of the entire Yamalo-Nanets region could be significantly paused until at least next spring.

The problem for Russia is that there's not much they can do about this.

In fact, Ukraine may have been preparing the ground for strikes exactly like these for quite some time.

And now, opportunity is knocking.

Or perhaps combusting.

Already several months ago, we saw satellite images that confirmed something important.

Russia had begun to pull their air defense systems away from the Arctic, and had begun placing them around Moscow instead.

Satellite images showed huge quantities of air defense systems that were in the Arctic earlier in the war that are now mysteriously absent.

And this included the defenses around some of Russia's most strategic Arctic locations, such as those around key nuclear facilities, or those around Severodvinsk, the only place in all of Russia capable of building new nuclear submarines.

And if Russia has effectively abandoned these places to their fate, what does that say about the rest of their Arctic infrastructure? In moving these systems, Russia revealed their hand in many ways.

They showed that they simply did not have the resources to defend their vast territory, giving Ukraine essentially free reign to hit many new categories of targets.

And that means that Russia can't wrap up the defenses here in the Arctic without sacrificing the defenses they already moved from the Arctic to the capital, whose defenses are already woefully inadequate as it is, and clearly the top priority for Russia.

This poises the Russian Arctic for what could potentially be the most devastating strikes of this entire war.

And soon.