Why Bombing Campaigns Don't Break Civilian Morale

Four and a half years into Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has yet to seize a single one of the four Ukrainian provinces he formally annexed. His army has ground forward in the east at enormous cost, but the territorial ambitions that supposedly justified the war remain, in any meaningful sense, unfulfilled. So Putin has turned to a different instrument: relentless drone and missile strikes against Ukrainian cities, targeting residential neighborhoods, open-air markets, shopping malls, hospitals, and cultural institutions. The calculation, apparently, is that bombing campaigns civilian morale will eventually crack — that Ukrainians, exhausted and frozen, will lose the will to keep fighting. History gives that calculation very poor odds.

Why Putin Is Betting on Bombing — and Why That Bet Rarely Pays Off

When conventional ground offensives stall, commanders throughout history have reached for air power as a shortcut to victory. The logic is intuitive: destroy enough of what civilians value — their homes, their markets, their sense of safety — and their government will face irresistible pressure to capitulate. It is a theory of coercion that compresses a long and bloody chess match into a simpler equation. The problem is that the equation almost never works the way its architects expect.

Russia's strikes against Kyiv, Dnipro, Kharkiv, Kherson, Odesa, and Mykolaiv follow this template precisely. Kyiv has absorbed the heaviest blows. Among the documented targets are the Dobrobut medical centre and the National Academy of Sciences — institutions that serve civilian life and national identity, not military functions. The choice of targets signals intent: this is not purely about degrading Ukrainian military capacity. It is about making ordinary Ukrainian life feel unbearable. That distinction matters enormously, because decades of empirical research show that targeting civilian morale through bombardment is one of the least reliable strategies in modern warfare.

What History Teaches About Bombing Civilian Populations

The most rigorous early examination of strategic bombing's effects came from the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, conducted immediately after World War II. American and British analysts interviewed hundreds of thousands of German and Japanese civilians and reviewed production records, casualty figures, and morale surveys. Their findings were uncomfortable for air power advocates: German civilian morale did not collapse under Allied bombing, even as cities were reduced to rubble and casualties climbed into the hundreds of thousands. Industrial output actually increased in some sectors until very late in the war. In Britain, the Blitz produced a comparable result in reverse — rather than breaking British resolve, German bombing raids hardened public determination and boosted Winston Churchill's political standing.

Political scientist Robert Pape's 1996 study Bombing to Win remains the most systematic empirical treatment of the question. Pape examined every major coercive air campaign of the twentieth century and found that strategic bombing against civilian populations succeeded in compelling political concessions in a small minority of cases — and almost never when the targeted population was defending its own homeland against foreign occupation. Nationalism, Pape argued, functions as a psychological buffer. People who believe they are fighting for survival, sovereignty, or cultural existence are remarkably resistant to coercive pressure from above. The pain inflicted by bombing does not translate into a demand that the government surrender; it translates into rage at the attacker.

This is not a fringe academic view. The British military strategist Basil Liddell Hart made the same argument in the 1930s. More recent scholarship on asymmetric conflict — including work by Ivan Arreguín-Toft on how weaker actors win wars — reinforces the conclusion. Coercion through terror works best against populations with limited attachment to the cause being fought over. It works worst against populations who understand themselves to be fighting for existence itself.

Russia's Campaign Against Ukrainian Cities: Targets and Toll

The documented targets of Russia's recent strikes illustrate the indiscriminate nature of the campaign. Hitting residential buildings and large open-air markets produces mass civilian casualties without any plausible military rationale. Striking the Dobrobut medical centre attacks healthcare infrastructure that serves wounded soldiers and civilians alike — a category of target explicitly protected under international humanitarian law. Hitting the National Academy of Sciences strikes at Ukrainian intellectual and cultural heritage, a choice that reads less as military calculation and more as an attempt at civilizational erasure.

Cities that had partially recovered from earlier phases of the war — Dnipro, Kharkiv, Odesa, Mykolaiv, Kherson — have been targeted again as winter approaches. The timing is not accidental. Destroying heating infrastructure, power generation, and water supplies in autumn creates suffering that compounds through winter. Russia used this approach extensively in 2022 and 2023, targeting energy infrastructure with drone swarms designed to overwhelm air defense systems. Ukraine repaired, adapted, and endured. There is no particular reason to believe the outcome will differ now.

Ukrainian Resolve: Why the Strategy Is Backfiring

Polling conducted by Ukrainian research institutions throughout the war has consistently shown public support for continued resistance running above 70 percent, even as casualties mount and infrastructure suffers. That figure has not collapsed in direct proportion to the intensity of Russian bombing — if anything, surveys taken after major strike waves have shown brief upticks in resolve, consistent with the rally-around-the-flag effect documented in the historical literature.

The cultural and psychological dynamics reinforce this. Ukrainian national identity was already undergoing a significant transformation before February 2022, with surveys showing rising identification as Ukrainian rather than Soviet or post-Soviet. The full-scale invasion accelerated that shift dramatically. When Russia bombs a hospital or an academy of sciences, it is not bombing an abstraction — it is bombing institutions that Ukrainians have specifically reclaimed as their own after decades of Soviet cultural suppression. The strike on the National Academy of Sciences, in particular, carries symbolic weight that is probably the opposite of what Russian planners intended. It does not demoralize; it reminds Ukrainians exactly what they are defending.

The Strategic Dead End: What Putin Risks by Doubling Down

Putin's escalating air campaign carries real strategic risks that extend beyond its failure to break Ukrainian morale. Each major strike on civilian infrastructure generates renewed pressure on European governments to accelerate weapons deliveries and expand support packages. Germany, France, and the United Kingdom have all cited specific Russian strikes on civilian targets as justification for policy shifts. The international political cost of bombing hospitals and science academies is non-trivial, and Russia has been paying it continuously since 2022 without achieving the compensating strategic gain.

There is also the question of ammunition economics. Producing ballistic missiles and advanced drones at the rate Russia has been expending them places sustained pressure on Russian defense industry capacity and on its relationships with suppliers. Intelligence assessments from multiple Western governments have flagged Russian artillery and missile inventories as a genuine constraint. Burning through those inventories on strikes that do not measurably advance the front line or erode Ukrainian will represents a poor return on scarce resources.

Finally, the fifth anniversary of the full-scale invasion approaches in early 2027. Putin staked his reputation and his country's military resources on a short war followed by territorial consolidation. Neither has happened. The longer the war continues without decisive Russian gains, the more the bombing campaign reads as an admission that conventional military objectives are out of reach — not as a path to victory, but as a substitute for one.

Conclusion: Coercion Through Terror Has a Poor Track Record

History's verdict on bombing campaigns civilian morale into submission is consistent across conflicts and decades: it does not work reliably, and it works least of all against populations defending their homes from foreign invasion. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey said so after examining Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Robert Pape's empirical analysis said so after reviewing a century of air campaigns. The Blitz, the bombing of North Vietnam, Israeli campaigns in Lebanon — all produced civilian suffering without producing the political capitulation that planners anticipated.

Putin, who has positioned himself as a student of history, should understand this record better than most. That he persists with a strategy the evidence consistently discredits suggests either that he has no better option or that he is choosing symbolic destruction over strategic sense. Neither explanation is reassuring. But for Ukrainians enduring another winter of strikes, the historical record offers one cold comfort: populations that have survived this kind of campaign before have almost always come out the other side more determined, not less.

Source: Opinion | The Guardian