Carlos Roa
A Ukrainian drone strike operation using disguised cargo containers has shattered Moscow’s strategic airpower. It may have blindsided Washington as well.
In a stunning maneuver, Ukraine has launched a coordinated series of deep strikes into Russian territory using containerized drones. Striking military airfields and critical assets across several locations (Olenya Air Base in the Murmansk region, Belaya Air Base in the Irkutsk region, Ivanovo Air Base in the Ivanovo region, and Dyagilevo Air Base in the Ryazan region), the attacks mark the first time since the Second World War that a European power has projected force this far into the Russian interior with such technological precision and asymmetric intent.
There were no paratroopers, no dramatic tank thrusts through the frontier, just unmarked cargo containers parked inconspicuously at truck stops and the side of the road, cracking open to unleash squadrons of long-range UAVs programmed with ruthless efficiency. Within minutes, at least 40 aircraft were reportedly damaged or destroyed on the ground, including Tu-22 and Tu-95 bombers—both of them nuclear-capable.
If these claims, originating from Ukraine’s Security Services (SBU), are even broadly accurate, then nearly a third of Russia’s strategic bomber fleet has been neutralized, along with 34 percent of Russia’s strategic cruise missile carriers. Ukraine naturally has an incentive to overstate and even exaggerate these numbers; Russian authorities will likely downplay them. Nevertheless, this kind of degradation of Russia’s nuclear deterrent, carried out by a non-nuclear state, is without precedent.
It is, in effect, Russia’s Pearl Harbor moment—a devastating blow to its strategic forces caused by innovative weapons delivered under the veil of impending diplomacy. As in 1941, the timing lends the strike a theatrical menace: destruction arriving not amid battle but on the eve of supposed conciliation. And the timing could hardly be more explosive. Just hours after the strike, President Volodymyr Zelensky announced that Kyiv would be sending a delegation led by Defense Minister Rustem Umerov to ceasefire talks with Russia in Istanbul the following day. That a Ukrainian delegation, led by its defense minister no less, arrives in Istanbul for ceasefire talks just after these strikes only sharpens the historical echo.
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