Ukraine just destroyed a fleet of Russian bombers. Strategic aircraft, deep inside Russian territory, hit with no NATO planes, no Western special forces, just domestic ingenuity and a long-range drone campaign that rewrote the limits of the war.
And yet, all anyone can talk about now is what happens next.
Russia will respond; it always does, it won’t be targeted, it won’t be proportional, and it won’t even try to be strategic. It’ll be about humiliation. Optics. Fear. Civilian infrastructure will be hit, because that’s what the Kremlin strikes when it’s trying to reassert dominance: apartment buildings, power grids, and evacuation routes. These kinds of strikes won’t turn the tide of war but will make the West remember that Putin still knows how to make people bleed.
When it happens, and it will, the United States and its allies will do what they’ve done before: they’ll issue a statement, add another round of sanctions, maybe a visa ban on someone who hasn’t flown commercial in twenty years, a minor bank, perhaps, barred from a market it doesn’t use. There will be another arms package, more air defense systems, and more pledges of support. These actions won’t matter because the West is out of meaningful options, and everyone watching already knows it.
Sanctions were supposed to be the economic version of shock and awe. That was the phrase used in 2022 when the initial response to Russia’s full-scale invasion looked unified and formidable. Major banks were cut off, state reserves were frozen, and the Ruble briefly collapsed. But that moment passed, Russia adapted, oil revenues found new buyers, and Ruble trade stabilized. Oligarchs repositioned assets. Russia’s economy bent but didn’t break, and the political apparatus held.
Since then, sanctions have continued, but they’ve lost their punch. Not because the Treasury Department isn’t working, but because the architecture is tapped. What’s left are diminishing returns, lists that grow longer, designations that get narrower, and enforcement that moves slower.
What about seizing the $300 billion in Russian central bank assets that remain frozen in Western systems? That’s the nuclear option and no one’s reaching for it. Europe is fractured on the legal path forward, and Washington doesn’t want to set a precedent that might spook other foreign reserve holders. The capital is frozen, not seized. Symbolic, not strategic.
Could we go after the countries still buying Russian oil and gas? In theory, yes. But secondary sanctions would mean confronting India and China, and no serious Western policymaker is willing to do that today. Not while inflation still lingers and global supply chains are held together with duct tape. The West understands diplomacy requires flexibility, not fracture.
So the West will escalate where they can: more weapons, more Patriot systems, more training programs. These are meaningful on the ground, but they don’t deter anything. Russia doesn’t fear Western escalation anymore. It calculates against it, because it has learned what the West is really willing to do, and what it isn’t.
And that’s the heart of the problem.
The West’s response to Russian atrocities is no longer constrained by morality or capability. It’s constrained by realism. The tools that remain are the ones we’re not actually prepared to use. The West can talk about resolve, but they govern by threshold. And Russia knows exactly where the threshold is.
That doesn’t make the West weak, only makes them predictable. Predictability is stability, until it’s not. Until it invites pressure. Until it tells the world that there is no new cost for new cruelty, just more recycled responses and tired language.
When Russia strikes back for Spider Web, whether with missiles, or cyber-attacks, or something darker, there will be noise, headlines, official visits, and coordination calls. But there won’t be anything new. Not really.
And that’s not just a diplomatic limitation. It’s a strategic failure. One we’re all about to watch play out again.
Brett Erickson is Managing Principal of Obsidian Risk Advisors and serves on the Advisory Board of Loyola University Chicago’s Center for Compliance Studies.
