We haven’t seen any independent reports about Ukraine’s drone strike yesterday morning against Russia’s strategic bomber force (Tupolev Tu-95‘s, Tu-22‘s and Tu-160‘s). Ukraine claims that 40 or more of these aircraft were hit by its drones; if so, that would mean that up to a third of them have been damaged or destroyed. (Since the factories that produced these aircraft, and components for them, have mostly been shut down or drastically reduced in capacity, a severely damaged aircraft will take so long to repair and restore that it might as well be written off as destroyed anyway.)
My first thought is that this attack is not a surprise. Anyone studying military history and current military technology could have (and in many cases did) predict such a strike against Russian assets. The only surprise to me is that it’s taken so long to do it. I thought it would come within the first couple of years of the war.
Second, this should be an extremely urgent wake-up call to the West. Drone flights over our air bases have been publicly reported for years; I’ll be very surprised indeed if some, if not most of them were operated by potential enemies such as China, Russia, Iran and others. Some may also have been operated by terrorist groups or drug cartels looking for potential high-profile targets. A strike similar to Ukraine’s could be launched against the USA at any time by almost anyone, because there will be no difficulty getting drones and their explosive payloads into this country and right up to the boundaries of the air bases concerned. Our internal security measures are laughably poor (and I speak as one who had extensive experience of anti-terrorism measures in another country for the best part of two decades). I hope Defense Secretary Hegseth and his top brass are alert to that possibility, and I hope they’re doing something very concrete about it – because if they’re not, we could lose half our Air Force overnight. I mean that literally. The same could happen to any or all NATO country(ies).
My third thought is that this might escalate the Russia-Ukraine war to a new level of viciousness. Russia’s strategic bomber force, one of the “nuclear triad” legs that safeguard its independence and national pride, has suffered a severe blow. That might be enough to make already paranoid Russian politicians and military leaders even more so. How might they retaliate? There are a number of ways, up to and including tactical nuclear weapons. Will they go that far? Who knows? I suspect we may be about to find out.
Fourth, where did the containers holding those drones come from? I don’t think they were all smuggled clandestinely across an active war zone to penetrate Russia. I suspect at least some of them were shipped into Russia through third parties, perhaps as outwardly innocent-seeming commercial containers containing normal goods and products. Can that have been done without the involvement of the intelligence and/or customs officials in those third party nations? Possibly . . . but I’d be more inclined to believe that a certain degree of officially blind eyes were involved. If Russia can determine the ingress routes of those containers, it may be able to use its own extensive intelligence resources to find out whether official tolerance was given to their passage. If so, I won’t be at all surprised if Russia does something nasty to discourage those nations from further meddling. What might that be? Who can say?
Finally, this highlights how parlous is the international security situation at present. From Ukraine’s point of view, this strike was a no-brainer. Ukraine’s already losing on the battlefield, slowly but steadily. A big propaganda success like this, causing severe damage to its enemy, can only look positive from the loser’s perspective. However, for the nations supporting Ukraine, it’s a lot more difficult and dangerous. If it leads to Russian retaliation against, not just Ukraine, but every nation that supports it, that may drag the entire region into the war whether they like it or not. The almost suicidal fixation of some nations to support Ukraine no matter what is another aspect of this problem (for example, Germany’s recent removal of restrictions on its weapon exports to Ukraine, allowing the latter to use them to attack anywhere in Russian territory). In physics, Newton’s Third Law of Motion assures us that “to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”. In war, the reaction is equally guaranteed, but not that it’ll be equal. It can be a lot more than equal, to make a point. If Russia hits out at any and every nation it believes might have been involved with or supported the Ukraine drone strike, that may drag the whole of NATO into the war – and right now, NATO is in no condition to sustain a conflict of that nature for any length of time.
So . . . a propaganda and military success for Ukraine, but producing a much more volatile and dangerous situation for the wider region. Was that a win, overall? We’ll find out . . .
Peter
Why the UK Must Back Its Special Forces: Russia’s Hybrid Warfare and the Growing Threat to UK Security
