[Mick]

You’ve been given free access to this article from The Economist as a gift. You can open the link five times within seven days. After that it will expire.

An astonishing raid deep inside Russia rewrites the rules of war
https://economist.com/europe/2025/06/01/...ed_article

(Should be gifted)

Major kudos to the Ukrainians… the amount of thought that went into this was astounding.

The source described the operation as a multi-stage chess move, with the Russians first encouraged to move more of their planes to particular bases by Ukrainian strikes on other ones. Three days before the attack, dozens of planes had moved to the Olenya airfield in Murmansk province, according to reports published at the time. It was precisely here that the most damage was done.

If there really are “fewer than 90 operational Tu-22, Tu-95 and newer Tu-160s in total”, then Ukraine might have single-handedly taken out a third or more of the Russian fleet.  NATO owes the Ukrainians a huuuuuuge thank you.

Also, the victims included “rare and extremely expensive A-50 early-warning planes (Russia’s equivalent of the AWACS)”

There’s a word of caution at the end about how this could potentially be the equivalent of Sinop (unlikely, but nations are fickle), and of course it highlights our own vulnerabilities.

BC

Given the amount of furtive mapping and photographs our putative enemies have been taking of American bases and the extended vulnerability of our borders, I rather suspect our military has been planning for mass drone attacks against our military bases for decades by now.

[Mick]

You’ve been given free access to this article from The Economist as a gift. You can open the link five times within seven days. After that it will expire.

An astonishing raid deep inside Russia rewrites the rules of war
https://economist.com/europe/2025/06/01/...ed_article

(Should be gifted)

Major kudos to the Ukrainians… the amount of thought that went into this was astounding.

The source described the operation as a multi-stage chess move, with the Russians first encouraged to move more of their planes to particular bases by Ukrainian strikes on other ones. Three days before the attack, dozens of planes had moved to the Olenya airfield in Murmansk province, according to reports published at the time. It was precisely here that the most damage was done.

If there really are “fewer than 90 operational Tu-22, Tu-95 and newer Tu-160s in total”, then Ukraine might have single-handedly taken out a third or more of the Russian fleet.  NATO owes the Ukrainians a huuuuuuge thank you.

Also, the victims included “rare and extremely expensive A-50 early-warning planes (Russia’s equivalent of the AWACS)”

There’s a word of caution at the end about how this could potentially be the equivalent of Sinop (unlikely, but nations are fickle), and of course it highlights our own vulnerabilities.

BC

Given the amount of furtive mapping and photographs our putative enemies have been taking of American bases and the extended vulnerability of our borders, I rather suspect our military has been planning for mass drone attacks against our military bases for decades by now.