Ukraine’s drones strike back
The image at Lawyers, Guns, and Money is a joke, but it’s what caught my eye first. In its audacious drone attacks on Russian air bases over the weekend, Ukraine smuggled small drones deep into Russia aboard semi-trucks and launched them by remote control. Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, reportedly oversaw the operation personally.
Ukraine’s drone attack on airfields deep inside Russia on Sunday was a strategic and symbolic blow that military analysts said was designed to slow Moscow’s relentless bombing campaign and to demonstrate that Kyiv can still raise the cost of war for the Kremlin.
When they say deep, they mean it. The Times included a map:
Operation Spiderweb employed 117 remotely operated drones to attack across three time zones and thousands of miles from Ukraine. Ukraine’s security service claims it damaged or destroyed 41 aircraft including strategic bombers used to launch cruise missile attacks on Ukraine.
The Russian Ministry of Defense said that Ukraine attacked airfields in the Murmansk, Irkutsk, Ivanovo, Ryazan and Amur regions, and that it thwarted attacks at three of the bases. The New York Times verified videos that showed successful strikes at Olenya Air Base in the Murmansk region and Belaya Air Base in the Irkutsk region and damage to at least five aircraft, four of them strategic bombers.
The Guardian reports:
Several Russian and Ukrainian media outlets reported that Ukraine carried out the operation by launching drones from lorries parked near military airfields deep inside Russia.
Ukrainian officials told the media that the operation – codename “Spiderweb” – had been in preparation for more than 18 months. The drones were first smuggled into Russia and later concealed under the roofs of small wooden sheds which were loaded on to trucks and driven to the perimeter of the airbases. The roof panels of the sheds were lifted off by a remotely activated mechanism, allowing the drones to fly out and begin their attack, the official said.
News services are still trying to independently verify the battle damage.
BBC:
“No intelligence operation in the world has done anything like this before,” defence analyst Serhii Kuzan told Ukrainian TV.
“These strategic bombers are capable of launching long-range strikes against us,” he said. “There are only 120 of them and we struck 40. That’s an incredible figure.”
It is hard to assess the damage, but Ukrainian military blogger Oleksandr Kovalenko says that even if the bombers, and command and control aircraft were not destroyed, the impact is enormous.
“The extent of the damage is such that the Russian military-industrial complex, in its current state, is unlikely to be able to restore them in the near future,” he wrote on his Telegram channel.
Max Boot of The Washington Post writes that Ukraine just rewrote the rules of war and compared the attack to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor:
In the process, the Ukrainians revealed a vulnerability that should give every general in the world sleepless nights. If the Ukrainians could sneak drones so close to major air bases in a police state such as Russia, what is to prevent the Chinese from doing the same with U.S. air bases? Or the Pakistanis with Indian air bases? Or the North Koreans with South Korean air bases?
Militaries that thought they had secured their air bases with electrified fences and guard posts will now have to reckon with the threat from the skies posed by cheap, ubiquitous drones that can be easily modified for military use. This will necessitate a massive investment in counter-drone systems. Money spent on conventional manned weapons systems increasingly looks to be as wasted as spending on the cavalry in the 1930s.
Ukraine’s attack is hardly a decisive blow against Russia, but another David vs. Goliath success from a country fighting an asymmetric war and mastering the genre. Boot observes, “Sunday’s attack shows, yet again, that the Ukrainians are proving far more resilient and adaptable fighters than anyone had anticipated before the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion more than three years ago.”
If only Democrats were so resilient and nimble in responding to the asymmetric information war they are in with conservative media Goliaths in this country. But no.
Cheryl Rofer writes at the original Lawyers, Guns, and Money post, “The Ukrainians are master strategists, to steal Darth Putin’s conceit. High value target? The planes causing most of the destruction in Ukraine. Vulnerable on the tarmac, carrying the fuel that will destroy them when a match is supplied. So the Ukrainians figured out how to supply those matches.”
Let’s note that Ukraine does not have a monopoly on asymmetric tactics (Politico):
Who set fire to the Marywilska 44 shopping mall in Poland last year? In May, authorities in Warsaw announced they now know the answer, and that the perpetrators were ordinary civilians recruited by Russia.
The arrangement is very on trend. The Kremlin has been using freelancers to carry out dirty deeds across Europe with increasing frequency — and those freelancers can be anyone. The strategy is as sinister as it is effective. It’s also a law enforcement nightmare.
Sabotage in Germany against hundreds of private cars in 2024 appeared to be carried out by political activists. Police later found they were one-off, gig attacks “committed by various small-time criminals who were recruited by a Russian agent on the messaging app Viber. The agent had promised — and delivered — payment of €100 per car, one of the suspects told the police.”
UPDATE: Added Avdeeva tweet & quote.
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