Ukraine is gaining the upper hand. Putin will be terrified
Ukraine's extraordinary attack deep inside Russia has, at a stroke, rewritten the rules of modern war. On Sunday a swarm of small drones, each costing under $500, rose over four Russian airfields deep inside Siberia and the Arctic and destroyed over forty strategic bombers reportedly worth over $7 billion. Thanks to meticulous planning, sophisticated military imagination and an underdog's boldness of vision, Kyiv's forces have landed a stunning blow on their far stronger opponent, opening a new chapter in the history of human conflict.
The question that will be haunting Putin is – what's next? Ukraine's famously stone-faced chief of military intelligence, or HUR, Major-General Kyrylo Budanov, has built his covert operations forces into a weapon as deadly, if not more so, than Israel's Mossad, its only international rival. And like the Biblical champion Goliath, it is precisely the vast lumbering size of Russia that makes it fatally vulnerable to small but precisely aimed projectiles from David's small but deadly slingshot.
Many of the details of Sunday's drone operation come from the Ukrainian side, so may be taken with a pinch of salt. But the basic logistics of the strike are in no doubt. Ukrainian military engineers, possibly already inside Russia, covertly loaded dozens of explosives-laden drones into special compartments set into the roofs of standard 40-foot steel shipping containers. Using a network of haulage companies set up for the purpose, Ukrainian operatives recruited truck drivers via commercial apps to drive their loads to specific designations next to military airfields thousands of miles away from the Ukrainian border.
At a predetermined time the drones buzzed into the air and headed for the airfields with their deadly payloads – to the amazement of the Russian drivers, some of whom posted profanity-laced mobile phone footage of their own rigs – and suddenly transformed into mobile drone-launch platforms. First-person footage from the drones released by the HUR shows the unmanned aerial vehicles carefully lining up over fuel tanks in the bombers' wings before closing in for the kill. Military drone specialists have speculated that the drones were not targeted remotely by human operators but were rather programmed by artificial intelligence to recognise the distinctive shape of Russian Tu-22 and Tu-95 strategic bombers, making them invulnerable to electronic jamming.
If the sci-fi novelty of the strikes seems like something out of the dystopian world of Black Mirror, the revolutionary implications for the future of warfare are plain enough. A world where multibillion dollar pieces of sophisticated military hardware can be eliminated en masse by drones light enough to be held in one hand and simple enough to assemble in a garage is one where the conventional balance of power has been upended forever.
What should really be worrying Putin is how target-rich his country is for Kyiv's drone hunters. His economy is dependent on a vast network of oil and gas wells pipelines, pumping stations, refineries, storage depots and shipping terminals. Many such facilities have already been targeted by older generation long-range drones, which resemble slow-moving miniature civilian aircraft loaded with explosives. These were launched from inside Ukraine and were vulnerable to anti-missile defences and radio jamming – though a few succeeded in scoring psychologically important hits, for instance a bullseye right on the roof of the Kremlin's Senate Palace back in May 2023. Imagine the devastating power of the new Ukrainian drones, pre-programmed with visual coordinates and launched from just a few hundred yards from their targets, on airports, bridges, factories and military headquarters.
The HUR has, like Mossad, also shown a steely disregard for moral niceties in pursuit of revenge. Back in October 2022 a Russian truck driver was recruited as an unwitting suicide bomber as he picked up a commercial payload across the Kerch Bridge linking Russia proper with occupied Crimea. The container was packed with explosives, seriously damaging the bridge and killing the driver. Suicide bombing by false-flag recruitment has become an HUR signature. Last week a man reportedly recruited to honeytrap a senior Russian commander via a gay dating app was blown up, along with his target, with a bomb concealed in a hidden camera he had been given to wear supposedly to record the liaison.
Until this year, Kyiv's allies and sponsors in Washington had frowned on this kind of borderline terror activity for fear of provoking Russian escalation. The CIA was furious when a team of six Ukrainian divers intentionally destroyed the Nord Stream pipeline in September 2022 (though Western intelligence, fearful of a backlash against continued support for Ukraine, kept publicly quiet about the operation). But with the Trump administration disengaging from both material support for Kyiv and control over the Ukraine's war effort, the gloves are now off.
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