Helene CooperJulian E. BarnesEric SchmittLara Jakes and Adam Entous, Ukraine Shows It Can Still Flip the Script on How Wars Are Waged, NYTimes, June 2, 2025.
In launching an audacious drone attack on airfields and warplanes deep inside Russia, Ukraine is continuing to change the way wars will be conducted in the 21st century, according to U.S. officials and military analysts.
American and European security officials said battle damage assessments were still coming in from the attacks, which took place Sunday, but they estimated that as many as 20 Russian strategic aircraft may have been destroyed or severely damaged, dealing a serious blow to Russian’s long-range strike capabilities.
Officials said Russia’s losses included six Tu-95 and four TU-22M long-range strategic bombers, as well as A-50 warplanes, which are used to detect air defenses and guided missiles.
The attack, known as Operation Spider’s Web, hurt Moscow’s prized strategic capabilities. But just as significantly, it demonstrated Ukraine’s ability to strike nearly anywhere in Russia, and to destroy warplanes costing $100 million or more with drones with price tags as low as $600, according to one U.S. defense official. [...]
The drones were smuggled into Russia and packed inside wooden transport containers that had remote-controlled lids and then loaded onto trucks, the S.B.U. said in a statement.
One U.S. defense official compared the Ukrainian move to the Israeli operation last year that targeted the pagers of Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon.
The next level:
But Ukraine “has now taken warfare to the next level,” said Evelyn Farkas, a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia.
“They are showing that you can now coordinate drones in order to achieve strategic effect,” Dr. Farkas, who is now the executive director of the McCain Institute, said in an interview.
Kateryna Stepanenko, a Russia analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, said the strikes show that “nowhere in Russia is safe,” and that Ukraine is “shaping a new type of warfare.”
And US military bases?
Samuel Bendett, an expert on Russian drones and other weapons at the Center for Naval Analysis, said “we are slowly coming around” to threats posed against American military bases by drones.
“When it comes to large military bases that have a lot of aircraft parked on the tarmac, the lesson from the Ukrainian attack is that such a strike can potentially come at any moment,” Mr. Bendett said on Monday. “At this point, it’s unlikely that our bases feature comprehensive protection against short range threats.”
And Trump wants to waste more money:
Ukraine’s attacks on Russian airfields show that the $175 billion that Mr. Trump wants to spend on the shield project “is a misapplication of resources,” said Alexander Vindman, a Ukrainian-born former U.S. Army officer who served on the National Security Council in 2019.
There's more at the link.
No comments:
Post a Comment