If what the Ukrainian security service has told the public is even half true, their long-range strikes against the Russian air force on June 1 were an operational success on a grand scale. The Ukrainians say that they damaged or destroyed roughly a third of Russia’s strategic cruise-missile carriers, striking targets at bases from the Arctic Circle in Murmansk all the way to the far end of the Eurasian steppe along the Mongolian border in Irkutsk. Russia’s vast depths failed to contribute to their customary strategic advantage.
The raids also demonstrated that the future of war is now. To overcome Russia’s advantage in distance and evade its air defenses, the Ukrainians infiltrated cheap drones in trucks, launched them remotely in close proximity to their targets, and apparently leveraged local telecom networks for control, though reportedly using some degree of autonomy as well—the details are not clear. Some of the targeted aircraft are no longer in production and are thus likely irreplicable. The Ukrainians say the tab in damaged or destroyed equipment for the Russians is in the vicinity of $7 billion. The cost of the attack was certainly orders of magnitude less than that—just as the effective demolition of Russia’s Black Sea fleet cost much less than the destroyed assets themselves. We knew that an “anti-navy” was a feature of the modern battlefield; logically an “anti-air force” was just as plausible.