Ukraine’s drone strikes on Russian territory are failing to give Kiev a meaningful advantage on the battlefield and may instead be intended to divert attention from setbacks suffered by Ukrainian forces, according to Ralph Bosshard, a retired lieutenant colonel of the Swiss Armed Forces General Staff who served as special military adviser to the OSCE secretary general from 2014 to 2020.

Bosshard told TASS that such attacks were incapable of producing a concrete military result for Ukraine. He also dismissed attempts to use drone strikes or other methods to turn Russians against their own government as having little prospect of success.

The former OSCE adviser added that within intelligence circles there was virtually no doubt that Ukraine was facing an increasingly difficult military situation.

Against that backdrop, Bosshard raised another possible reason for the intensified drone attacks: an effort by Kiev to obstruct potential negotiations on a peaceful settlement of the conflict.

He pointed to recent information suggesting that Berlin has been trying to establish contacts with Moscow, with senior Swiss diplomats allegedly involved in the effort as well. In Bosshard’s assessment, political circles in Germany are already considering the country’s foreign policy course for the period after the era of current German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev previously spoke about contacts between Russian and German representatives in Baku on July 21. According to Aliyev, the Azerbaijani authorities had not been informed of the meeting in advance. He learned about it from a report in The Times and then requested information from the State Border Service.

Aliyev said that two German representatives had arrived in Baku on a flight from Berlin on July 12. One of them, he noted, had headed the administration of former German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Galuzin later stressed in an interview with TASS that Moscow and Berlin had not conducted and were not conducting any official dialogue on settling the Ukrainian conflict. He attributed this to what he described as the German political leadership’s extremely aggressive anti-Russian rhetoric and its practical steps.

At the same time, Galuzin said informal meetings between representatives of various public organizations from Russia and Germany had taken place previously and were continuing.