“We also have stronger tactical solutions. Our operation ‘Spider Web’ proved that yesterday. Russia needs to feel what its losses mean,” said Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky, a day after one of the boldest – if not the most – attacks on Russian soil since the war in February 2022.
Their drones have reached military bases on the outskirts of Moscow, Arctic and Siberia, more than 4,500 km away from Ukraine, destroying, according to Kiev, dozens of aircraft, including some capable of nuclear attacks. An action that was nicknamed “Pearl Harbor Russian” by Pro-Kremlin military bloggers, a reference to the Japanese attack on the state of Hawaii, in 1941, which marked US entry into World War II.
The comparison can be exaggerated – 2,300 US military personnel died in Pearl Harbor, and hundreds of planes and ships were destroyed – but the Ukrainian “spider web” has had a sensitive impact to the Russian military machine, which goes beyond the Putin war in Ukraine.
Starting with material damage. According to Ukrainian military intelligence, damaged or destroyed aircraft include Beriev A-50, whose role is to coordinate the action of combat fighters and identify defense systems, such as those used by Kiev. It is estimated that only 10 are in operation today, and at least three have been destroyed from the beginning of the invasion-they stopped being produced in 1992.
Two other models cited are the Tupolev Tu-95 and Tu-22m3, which are able to perform conventional attacks and also with nuclear weapons. The Tu-95 integrates, next to the Tu-160, one of the pillars of the Russian nuclear triad. Like the A-50, the Tu-95 the Tu-22m3 have no longer produced since the end of the Soviet Union.
Despite the scope of the action, no one believes the drones will make Vladimir Putin change their short -term plans. Russia has intensified its bombing in recent weeks, and has positioned 50,000 military personnel on the northeast border of Ukraine. Some of their fiercest supporters already advocate a large -scale response, including nuclear weapons, but the government will hardly serve them.
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But there is another kind of damage difficult to soften: the psychological. Seeing $ 600 drones destroying $ 100 million aircraft in Siberia showed, once again, the vulnerabilities of local defense systems in the face of a new technology -based military strategy.
With the aircraft, Kiev sent the message that no place is safe in the Russian Federation, and that the Russian state will not be able to guarantee the integrity of its citizens while continuing to attack the Ukrainian territory. Internally, the feeling of failure of security services can undermine confidence in the regime, along with factors such as economic instability.
“Ukraine Drone attack Mina the Russian security system itself, as much as it represents a military threat,” he wrote in The Moscow Times Kevin Riehle, a professor at Brunel University in London. “The reality of the threat runs the risk of exposing the security system as incompetent.”
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There is also a message to Donald Trump. In February, during an altercation with Zelensky at the White House, the American leader said Kiev “had no cards” to use in the war against Putin. With the attack, the Ukrainian shows that he has managed to adapt to the circumstances and is not defeated. It remains to be seen if it will be sufficient for the US to resume the most critical posture to Moscow.
