A massive explosion rocked the Russian border city of Belgorod yesterday. It’s an area that has faced repeated bombings that the Russians have blamed on Ukrainian UAV activity. But what happened on Thursday was far more than a UAV bombing. This was something bigger.

According to reports, there was “a blast that made nearby apartment buildings tremble and threw a car on a store roof.” The bombing left a 66-foot-wide crater in the middle of the street. Everyone wondered what in the hell Ukraine hit them with.

Well… it wasn’t Ukraine. The Russian military has instead admitted that one of their own bombers accidentally dropped the bomb, meaning the Russian military bombed its own city. Honestly, it would be funny if it wasn’t so bizarre. Here’s a video of it, and you can see the massive explosion it caused.

Clearer video of a Russian bomb that detonated in Belgorod last night. pic.twitter.com/vZnoFFvq7J

— Dmitri (@wartranslated) April 21, 2023

Via CBS News:

Immediately after the explosion, Russian commentators and military bloggers were abuzz with theories about what weapon Ukraine had used for the attack. Many called for a powerful retribution. But about an hour later, the Russian Defense Ministry acknowledged that the explosion was caused by a weapon accidentally dropped by one of its own Su-34 bombers. It didn’t offer any further details, but military experts said the weapon likely was a powerful 1,100-pound bomb.

In Thursday’s blast, the weapon was apparently set to explode with a small delay after impact, to hit underground facilities.

[…]

The explosion in Belgorod followed the crash of a Russian warplane next to a residential building in the port city of Yeysk on the Sea of Azov that killed 15 people. Yeysk hosts a big Russian air base with warplanes flying missions over Ukraine.

Military experts have noted that as the number of Russian military flights have increased sharply during the fighting, so have the crashes and accidents.

As the story above later notes, military analysts have compared what Russia’s doing to Ukraine to what Russia did in World War I – just throwing as many people and weapons at the enemy as possible with little return. As my colleague Streiff noted yesterday, Russia’s winter offensive appears to have fizzled a bit, and Ukraine is in the progress of launching a counter-offensive.

So, while Russia may have more resources to throw at this war, those resources are, once again, seemingly producing little in terms of results.

And given that they are picking up whoever they can off the street, essentially, to keep their military going, more of these accidents are happening. The Russian military everyone was worried about for so long accidentally bombing its own cities is not a sign of a healthy and powerful fighting force. It’s a sign of rot.

I’m no expert here (refer back to Streiff for better analysis on all this), but this war has managed to show the world that Russia’s military may actually be more of a paper tiger than anyone was ever ready to admit. We’re in the 60th week of this conflict and it seems like Russia is no closer to its goals than it was in the early part of the war.

It’s no wonder that China is wanting to get a bit more involved with Russia. Under the old way of looking at the global power alignment, everyone saw the U.S.-Russia dynamic as the power balance, with an emerging China shifting the globe into a tri-polar balance. But if China sees Russia’s struggles as a sign of weakness, then their mutual goal of keeping the West out of their spheres of influence is under threat. Russia, in effect, becomes more of an ally to China, which assumes control of the eastern power sphere.

Which is all a bit in the weeds, but it’s important. Vladimir Putin does appear to be far weaker now than he ever was, and that leaves Xi Jinping ready to pick up the pieces and start to build a coalition that he can use to oppose the U.S.

So, while I suspect the primary strategy behind throwing money at Ukraine is the U.S. foreign policy establishment using Ukraine to drain Russia’s resources and weaken Putin, it is making it a lot easier for China to assume control of the anti-U.S./anti-Western sentiment around the world.