WHAT WOULD WE EVER DO WITHOUT EXPERTS?

Particularly, armchair strategists with no understanding of logistics.  "Ukraine is defying the US over strikes on Russian oil refineries. Experts say it's a necessary risk."

Only in the common room, or among the talking heads on the Sunday shows, does any of the following make sense.

Four days after the US voted to sign off a long-awaited $61 billion in aid, Ukraine did the one thing that the White House has reportedly been asking it not to do: It struck another oil facility on Russian soil.

Ukraine says that Wednesday's drone attack took out about 900,000 cubic feet of Russian fuel. This was followed on Friday by 10 drones slamming into an oil refinery in Krasnodar, shutting the plant down, The Telegraph reported.

These are just the latest in a ferocious string of attacks on Russian energy facilities, launched by Ukraine since the start of the year.

Ukraine's rationale for hitting Russia's energy infrastructure came in response to the muted impact of Western sanctions, as well as delays in Western aid as it struggled to hold the front line.

Ukraine needed to be "more creative, or think in more 3D terms about the battle space," Ann Marie Dailey, a geopolitical strategist at the RAND Corporation, told BI.

"You need to find other ways to weaken your opponent and stretch their resources," she added.

What a nasty piece of work is Dementia Joe. In addition to pleading with Israel to pull its punches in order that the jihadi element of his coalition shows up to vote in Michigan and Minnesota, now he's hoping that Ukraine will pull its punches in order that summer road trippers don't cancel their cross-country trips to the national parks and roller coasters thanks to the sticker shock.

That's not how any of this works.

Ukraine risks alienating its most powerful ally by going against the US just days after Congress approved a hefty military aid package.

But, as multiple analysts have said, the aid package alone isn't going to win the war. Ukraine needs ways of weakening Russia, and that includes striking its energy infrastructure, Dailey said.

She likened the situation to a boxing match in which one fighter is only allowed to hit the other's arms.

And Russia has been landing body blows. On Saturday, Russia unleashed a massive attack on Ukraine's energy facilities, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.

Russia has previously said that attacks like these are a direct response to Ukraine's own attacks, according to the Post, a stance that, on the surface at least, seems to validate US fears.

Even so, Ukraine has a point to prove about its own agency in the war, Olga Tokariuk, an academy fellow at London's Chatham House, told BI.

Russia has repeatedly tried to paint the conflict as a proxy battle between itself and the US, diminishing Ukraine's role, she said.

By ignoring the White House on key issues of military strategy, Zelenskyy can demonstrate that Ukrainians "have their own agency, they have functioning democratic institutions, even amid war, and they're able to make their own decisions," Tokariuk added.

And, as some analysts have noted, the political situation in the US — with former President Donald Trump vying to regain the presidency — could mean that this is the last aid package Ukraine gets from the US.

This "somehow frees them to actually keep on conducting those strikes," Miron said.

There's nothing quite like sitting in a cushy office on your foggy bottom to stifle sharp thinking.

Ukraine's attacks are taking place hundreds of miles behind enemy lines, far from the home territory it is trying to defend.

Part of the US' unease, Pentagon official Celeste Wallander told a House panel earlier this month, rests on the fact that energy infrastructure is a civilian target and not a military one, as the Post reported.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin previously said that the US would prefer that Ukraine target Russian airfields, the outlet reported.

But there is also the question of how effective the attacks are in military terms. As Carnegie scholar Sergey Vakulenko wrote recently, even if Ukraine took out every oil and gas facility within reach, Russia would likely still have enough for its own uses.

"Taking out a particular refinery is not going to immediately undermine Russia's war effort," said Dailey, the RAND strategist. "But consistently putting pressure on Russia's oil sector would have a significant impact on Russia's ability to fight this war."

She said that, in the long term, lower oil output would cut into Russia's access to export earnings — vital foreign currency it uses to buy materials it needs for advanced weaponry.

Vakulenko, in his article, also noted that that strikes on Russian oil refineries have "little impact on Russian export earnings."

But, he said, if Ukraine keeps up the same pace of attacks it set in March, it "will be able to keep damaging Russian refineries faster than they can be fixed, slowly but steadily eroding the country's refining capacity."

A barrel of fuel not produced is a barrel of fuel unavailable for powering a tank in the Luhansk sector, or for powering a fishing boat on Lake Baikal, or for sale to China or one of those Atlantic Alliance countries providing hard currency.

Next Thursday is the 79th anniversary of Victory Day.  Apparently the Immortal Regiment (portraits of veterans of the Great Patriotic War now being carried by their great-grandchildren) will not be marching in Moscow, perhaps out of fear that some young faces who never came back from Ukraine.  Victory Day parades in cities closer to the Ukrainian front are cancelled completely.  "May 9 parades were canceled in five oblasts of Russia, namely Bryansk, Pskov, Belgorod, Ryazan and Kursk."

Wars end either when one side is outmatched, or when one side is unable to sustain its efforts until the other side is outmatched. Nearly half a million dead for a stalemate along the Don, and less fuel available for those Lada and Moskvitch owners (or whatever they're making now) and even the most determined of dictators might have to face reality, or a coup.