In a brilliant operation that the Ukrainians say took 18 months to pull off, Ukraine attacked five Russian strategic bases, destroying and damaging Russian nuclear bombers.
This is not the first time that Ukraine has attacked a Russian nuclear bomber site and other nuclear installations, including strategic missile early warning radars and closer-in Russian bomber bases. But this time, the attacks were very deep inside Russia.
The Russians do not use shelters for their bomber fleet, a measure that a number of Russian defense experts have demanded, but without success in persuading the authorities in Moscow. While shelters probably are inadequate against heavy missiles, they would more than suffice against small drones.
The US has a similar problem.
There are some aspects of the attack that warrant attention.
The first is that a strike deep inside Russia was in parallel to other large-scale Ukrainian drone attacks closer to their shared border with Russia. Additionally, there were attacks on rail bridges and rail lines in Bryansk and Kursk.
While Russian President Vladimir Putin was being briefed on the rail line attacks in the middle of the night, his air bases were exploding elsewhere.
It is also noteworthy that the bases under drone attack appear not to have air defenses, or at least air defenses capable of engaging small FPV drones. The Ukrainians probably learned this from NATO overhead intelligence sources. There are no reports of any of the drones aimed at the five bases being shot down.
Early reports suggested that the drones used in the attack were connected by satellite to Ukraine’s GUR (military intelligence) command centers. More recent information, and more reliable, is that the Ukrainian drones were operated through the LTE cellphone network in Russia.
LTE (which stands for Long Term Evolution) is a 4G cellular network and serves as the backbone of Russia’s cellular system. The Ukrainians had no difficulty acquiring SIM cards for the drones and the containers that contained them, which were carried in commercial trucks.
Reports indicate that the containers opened when they were within range of the targets. There is at least one report where a container top opened prematurely and the truck driver tried to push it closed, leading to an explosion. In another case, a truck was stopped and captured.
The Ukrainians also had no difficulty sending these large containers into Russia and putting them aboard trucks in a warehouse in Chelyabinsk. Chelyabinsk is a city in west-central Russia, close to the Ural Mountains.
From there, the drone trucks were sent to pre-designated locations. To do this and run such an operation a good sized team would have been needed. Ukraine claims they were all exfiltrated from Russian territory before the launch of the operation. Allegedly, the truck drivers were hired without knowing the contents of the cargo.
The brazenness of the operation, which risked exposure along the way but was never uncovered, suggests a massive failure of Russian intelligence and a completely incompetent internal security system. Russia’s backside has been heavily exposed to infiltration and intelligence operations managed by Ukraine.
While it has caught a number of relatively small fish, important government buildings, apartment blocks, theaters and military bases, along with frequent assassinations of Ukraine’s military and political enemies, have been targeted and hardly been challenged.
Conversely, Russia has been unable to threaten Ukraine in a parallel manner, relying on missile and drone strikes to “retaliate.” Even intelligence on Putin’s secret visit to Kursk was leaked to Ukraine, resulting in an attack on Putin’s helicopter that came close to shooting it down.
There are rumors that Putin is shaking up the FSB, Russia’s successor to the KGB. It is impossible to determine whether this will improve Russia’s internal security. There appears to be at least good circumstantial evidence that critical Russian civil and military institutions are infiltrated either by paid spies or by anti-Putin and anti-war factions.
Russia’s current troubles are, at least in part, not only a result of good Ukrainian intelligence operations, but also of years of effort by Western spy agencies, especially the UK’s MI-6, to try and destabilize Russia and bring down the Putin regime. But there is even more.
Trying to knock out strategic nuclear facilities, flirting even with a nuclear attack, is not very much in Ukraine’s interest, as Ukraine would be the first victim of a fierce Russian reaction. Such an attack is, however, consistent with what appears to be the NATO program to destabilize the Russian government and kill Putin.
In addition, and even more profoundly, the British and their European partners – the EU, France and Germany – are deeply concerned that the US is removing itself from the Ukraine war and possibly even pulling US troops out of NATO, at least some to start.
The Europeans know that this exposes them to an angry and dangerous Russia, so it is in their interest to try and push the US back into its traditional role of Europe’s protector. Of course, this conflicts with rising US concern about China and its growing military capability that threatens US interests much more directly than anything that can be conjured up on behalf of NATO expansion in Ukraine.
If this assessment is right, US President Donald Trump is being worked over, and the air base and other attacks deep inside Russia are intended to grow the threat to Europe and Ukraine – and do so urgently.
The above assessment is also consistent with other collateral information. The negotiations now underway again in Istanbul appear to have generated a split between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his defense minister, Rustem Umarov.
Reports say that Umarov wants to find a way to make the Istanbul negotiations work while Zelensky is making every effort to scuttle them. Despite the latest attacks inside Russia, the Russians also appear to still want to try and see if progress can be made.
In the previous round of negotiations, when the Russians launched heavy missile and drone attacks on Ukraine, President Trump complained bitterly about Putin, suggesting he had gone “crazy.”
This time, Trump is completely silent about the latest Ukrainian attacks on Russian territory. Was Trump caught by surprise? Did he have prior notice, and if he did, why did he agree?
Axios initially reported that Trump was briefed ahead of time, but then hastily changed the story to reflect pushback from the US administration, stating that they did not know. One wonders where Axios got the original information, although it takes little guesswork that it came from some friendly foreign intelligence sources.
The bottom line is that the Trump administration was caught by surprise and, in fact, does not know what to do right now. Perhaps that is because these reckless attacks were aimed more at Washington than Moscow.
Stephen Bryen is a special correspondent to Asia Times and former US deputy undersecretary of defense for policy. This article, which originally appeared on his Substack newsletter Weapons and Strategy, is republished with permission.
