Ukraine’s audacious attack on Russia’s strategic bomber force, knocking out at least a third of the sophisticated planes slaughtering Ukrainian civilians, may not flip the script of Russia’s overpowering assault on a sovereign neighbor.
But, Damn! It has been an epic uplift of spirits for Ukraine’s inspirational President Volodymyr Zelensky’s underdogs and a long-overdue poke in the evil eye of Vladimir Putin.
It’s hard to deny the Ukrainians their moment of basking in the limelight of Kremlin comeuppance. After President Donald Trump worked so hard to deliver Ukraine to Putin in exchange for who-knows-what quid pro quo, it was heartening to see Ukraine execute what is being called Russia’s “Pearl Harbor” moment of reckoning.
Ukraine then followed up the stunning attack on Russian strategic bomber bases with a Tuesday blast at the bridge linking Russia’s Rostov region with seized and annexed Crimea, halting traffic across the sole link between mainland Russia and its most significant territorial conquest. It was unclear later Tuesday, though, whether traffic across the bridge had been restored.
Predictably, the Kremlin is casting Kyiv’s lightning blow to Russian pomposity as a terrorist action validating Moscow’s stagnant, decade-long effort to conquer Ukraine and its aspirations to join Western alliances.
The smoke has yet to clear from the four far-flung Russian air bases where Ukrainian drones unleashed brilliantly choreographed mayhem on Sunday morning. With an estimated investment of a few tens of thousands of dollars-worth of mostly Ukraine-produced drones, Kyiv claimed to have taken out 41 TU-95 and TU-22 nuclear missile-capable bombers and a few A-50 airborne coordination craft that are Russia’s equivalent of AWACS. These aircraft are irreplaceable because the Kremlin stopped building most combat aircraft shortly after the Soviet Union’s 1991 demise.
The Sunday morning strike is estimated by Ukrainian and Western analysts to have destroyed $7 billion of Russia’s most critical air resources.
A Russian Defense Ministry statement confirmed the attacks, conceding that aircraft and air bases had suffered damage in the Irkutsk region 2,500 miles from Ukrainian borders. The governor of the far-north Irkutsk region, Igor Ivanovich Kobzev, said the attack at the airfield was the first since the war began in February 2022 that reached Siberian territory.
Also hit in the drone strikes was the far-north Murmansk region along the Arctic Sea fleet bases. Military airfields in the Ivanovo and Ryazan regions in central and southern Russia also were hit.
“This is not a game changer but it’s a significant operational and psychological victory for Ukraine,” columnist and former Republican strategist Max Boot said in an after-action discussion among Washington Post opinion writers on Monday. “I doubt the message will get through but it should help convince Putin he is not going to win this war.”
At least not as easily as if Trump had stayed engaged long enough for Putin to recognize that the deal the MAGA White House was offering him was never going to be sweeter. Trump and Putin, two men overly impressed with their negotiating genius, miscalculated that Ukraine’s overwhelmed fighting force would eventually capitulate to the Kremlin’s superior might and seemingly inexhaustible population of male cannon fodder.
While Trump has lamented a lack of interest in ending the war by either Russia or Ukraine, he has turned a blind eye to Putin’s escalated aerial assault across the breadth of Ukraine—attacks that kill dozens, mostly civilians, in nightly barrages. Russia launched about 500 attack drones into Ukraine on the weekend before the Ukrainian drone blitz, Zelensky told Western media.
Putin and Trump fail to understand that Ukraine isn’t fighting for territory or military victory; the people of the post-Soviet state are committed to preserving their sovereignty. They are rejecting with every cell in their bodies a return to subservience to an authoritarian regime that they defected from 34 years ago.
But neither are Ukrainians ready to sell out to the new regime in Washington that is abandoning its own democratic principles and retreating from America’s historic post-war role as leader of the democratic world.
“I think the message is that the Ukrainians don’t trust the United States. They have scar tissue from all of the overly restrictive limitations imposed by the Biden administration on the use of U.S. weapons, so they are using drones not only because they are so effective but also because they are made in Ukraine,” Boot said of Kyiv’s mistrust of Washington that has accelerated since Trump returned to the White House four months ago.
Zelensky’s blow to Putin’s posture of invincibility upended Monday’s already fraught “peace talks” called by Russia in Istanbul, Turkey. With the Russian delegation having arrived with a no-can-do agenda at the first direct meeting of Russian and Ukrainian diplomats last month, little progress had been expected at the second round in which Russia’s envoys had not even presented the “memorandum” of their positions that was promised but undelivered two weeks ago.
Aside from the fruitless Istanbul gathering, analysts saw the Ukraine blow to Putin’s posture as the superior warlord as significant and humiliating.
“At a time when Putin seems to think that he is winning on the battlefield, this demonstrates that his forces are in fact very vulnerable,” Sven Biscop, director of the Brussels-based Egmont Institute think tank, told NBC. “This may not change the course of the war, but it does mean that every gain Russia makes will be at high cost.”
Zelensky hailed his assault on the unsheltered Kremlin war planes as “brilliant” and “perfectly prepared.” He said Ukraine used 117 drones to take out Russia’s cruise missile carriers and exfiltrate the Ukrainian perpetrators of the caper before it erupted.
“These are Ukrainian actions that will definitely be in history textbooks,” Zelensky wrote Sunday on the Telegram messaging channel.
Crowing about a strategic and embarrassing blow to the Kremlin is a rare opportunity for Kyiv but one that admirers of Zelensky can tolerate for his fierce resistance to the most egregious breach of the post-World War II order that Putin has perpetrated.
Discover more from Post Alley
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
The latest video footage from the Ukrainian drone strike has dropped. What I see in the videos is that many of the airplanes targeted were obviously in no condition to operationally conduct missions. Many had tires draped over the wings without indication of service vehicles or maintenance stands in the bay, which would indicate that the airplanes were not actually being used for strikes into Ukraine.
Russia’s fleet of Tu-95s and Tu-22M Backfires are old, really old. Not B-52 old but still date back to the Cold War. The difference between the US and Russia is that Russia doesn’t have the capability to maintain these aircraft. Assuredly many are parked and being used for spare parts. And Russia can’t build new ones. Operationally this degrades Russia’s ability to launch strikes on Ukrainian civilian infrastructure. Importantly it keeps Russia from overwhelming Ukrainian air defenses with combined Shahed drones and cruise missiles.
Video also shows two of Russia’s Beriev A-50 AWACS struck by drones having dirt and debris on the radome indications that these airplanes also may haven’t been flying.
OSINT sources have been using satellite imagery to estimate quantity of Soviet era armor in long-term storage. Conclusions are that much of what remains is rusted hulks unable to be refurbished.
Big picture. Putin’s war machine is in trouble. The quality of the equipment and the quality of the troops is not what it seems. One wonders in an autocratic state such as Russia whether Putin has an accurate assessment of what is military is capable of.
This story might make a good film. I’m glad to read that the Ukrainians involved got back out of Russia safe and sound, if that’s what “exfiltrate” means.