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Ukraine destroys more than 40 military aircraft in drone attack deep in Russia
239 consumer451 313 6/1/2025, 1:39:44 PM npr.org ↗
If they really decided to do it, they could make some kind on narrow-body bomber derivative of Il-96 in a few years.
Sure the resulting plane would not be optimized in a lot of aspects but they could do it.
Also, The Russian government relies on projection of an image of strength not just externally, but internally as well. If the Russian government is seen as weak internally they might be more likely to take drastic actions to stay in power.
Put all these together, and it seems like the world might just be a bit more dangerous today than it was yesterday. Maybe that is the Ukrainian strategy - make Russia do something monstrous to a western power to force western action.
If you want to try to impose some deeper strategic meaning onto this, a more plausible one would be the reverse: that the more "western powers" pull back from supporting Ukraine, the more Ukraine is are forced to establish they are capable of less conventional, less predictable, more aggressive means of deterrence to compensate for the absence of strong western partners.
If you analyze from the US or Russian perspective, you presuppose/assert them as the entities with agency while denying Ukrainians theirs.
Any framing of an analysis that does not start from the frame of a Ukrainian with agency is suspect.
Their only action would then be to use more nuclear weapons and they just aren’t going to do that because they don’t want to end the world.
Not necessarily, Russia's successful intelligence efforts for regime change in the US may have nullified US response.
Instead, find clear instances where the US is doing things like no longer sending Patriot missile launchers and missiles to Ukraine. [1]
[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-working-allies-deliveries-patr...
Watch it, then try saying nothing has changed. You seem like someone with a strong world view that's strong because you reject anything that challenges it.
At a minimum, the US stopped giving targeting intel to Ukraine; that itself is a pretty fundamental change.
Blame Putin for being a vicious bully, not the kids he's brutalizing for provoking him by defending themself from the assault.
[1] https://www.wdmma.org/russian-air-force.php
Also, these are remote airbases where all the strategic bombers are stationed. Fighter jets would not be there in significant numbers if any since they are needed in other bases closer to the front-lines and also some at the borders.
In in of the videos you could see a Mi-8 which was ignored because of it's insignificance compared to the primary targets.
Probably not many if any, they weren't attacked with area munitions but with FPV drones they were attacking bomber bases, specifically aiming to reduce offensive capability, there's not a lot of reason to target non-bomber other aircraft.
At the very end, you can even see how the bombers were hit: a drone strikes the right wing of a Tu-95, causing the internal fuel tanks to catch fire and spill burning fuel. The wing then breaks off and collapses.
Why were they loaded with fuel?
They also have a pattern of engaging in massive attacks right before major diplomatic events.
Russia and Ukraine have peace discussions scheduled for June 2 so Ukraine probably (and apparently correctly) anticipated Russia would be loading up for a bombing campaign the night before.
Could also just be fuel vapors in the tanks going off too. Do bears have rigid tanks? In WW2 there was a big difference in survival between planes that did vs ones with bladders that collapsed as fuel was consumed.
From another article (although maybe journalist is making shit up):
Also if they are part of Russia's strategic military assets, then wouldn't Russia wonder if the US was a secret puppetmaster?Here's a primer on how these things work in Russia.
You can be as careful as you want, if they decide they want confrontation with the US, they'll make up a reason.
If they don't feel confrontation is in their best interest, you can hit Moscow with a Tomahawk and, magically, no one will notice anything but a clapping sound.
They were nuclear-capable bombers that have regularly been used to attack Ukraine with conventional weapons (mostly cruise missiles.)
> Also if they are part of Russia's strategic military assets, then wouldn't Russia wonder if the US was a secret puppetmaster?
Increasing distrust between Putin and the Trump Administration would also be a coup for Ukraine, but, no, I don't think that's a real threat here.
Arrogance. My Diamond Star stays fuelled. But I’m not committing imbecilic war crimes.
Would assume that drones do not drop cumulative ammo, but the shrapnel ones. Those tires in theory should have protected from smaller pieces flying around causing a mess of a damage.
Russian media reports of 2-4 planes being destroyed while others are damaged. Think this dumb cheap hack actually helped a lot in minimizing the effectiveness of the strike.
Also, I don’t know why you would consider the reports in russian media. There’s more than 4 planes being destroyed on video.
The proven historical rule of thumb is take ukrainian reports, take russian reports, and the truth is in the middle. You'd have to question your own sanity to trust numbers from either side blindfoldingly
No it isn't. Russia's reports are complete fabrications.
The real marker is immediate numbers. I bet even Russians yet to find out how many aircrafts have they irrecoverably lost, however we get numbers reported as if they are confirmed.
Cheap
Ukraine doesn't have to fabricate about how Russia is killing its innocent civilians, or how Russia drove a Buk surface-to-air missile across their border and shot down a plane full of innocent civilians, which Russia 100% flat out denied. There is no "truth in the middle" there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17
Even in the extreme example of white Australians trying to pass as Malaysians, special forces have pulled of plenty of raids without the need for native language speakers.
Even if you need someone highly fluent who can pass as a native, most of the time there's a nearby country where they have some kind of grudge against the belligerent. I can think of a lot of potential theatres where finding an enemy of a belligerent who can pass as a "native" would not be difficult. North / South Korea, China / Taiwan, The Middle East ... conflicts often occur in places where there's a lot of conflict.
Also, in a war, often the military and civilian sector are stretched thin. Russia can't spare the troops to guard everything as well as they could in peacetime, and even if they could search every vehicle they can't afford to gum up their logistics.
It would not be necessary, as you pointed out, plenty of Ukrainians still live in Russia and they are free to drive trucks. Best of my knowledge, there is nothing like interment of Japanese that happened in US during WW2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...
There is no need to do so because they did employ a civilian drivers who never knew what 'cargo' they are hauling. Just like in the previous attack on the bridge.
Maybe the drones were pre-programmed for a particular destination (given to the Ukrainians by the US and its reconnaissance satellites), i.e., no drone operators needed.
And you don't need to permablock it, few minutes would be enough.
Edit: https://x.com/jimmysecuk/status/1929164382061092952
I had a friend who was gaming on his phone that was tethered to his desktop about a decade ago and after he disabled some power saving stuff in the settings on android he was getting a reasonable 100ms ping that had negligible jitter.
They either used the trucks as a relay for the operators far away or the drones themselves were automated.
Hard to know whether to be seriously impressed or seriously concerned - if Europe decided that enough was enough and started helping Ukraine with troops if they decided the Russian nuclear threat was a paper tiger we're in for some very interesting times.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_triad
They trucks used for the delivery were acquired (along with the mobile homes the drones were launched from that were on their beds) in Russia, as I understand it, not driven from Ukraine (of course, the drones still needed to be delivered from Ukraine for the attack packages to be assembled.)
"In the early morning hours of 29 December 2023, Russia launched what was seen to be the largest wave of missiles and drones yet seen in the Russo-Ukrainian War, with hundreds of missiles and drones hitting the Ukrainian capital Kyiv and other cities across the country."
You have to wonder how much of that time was inventing/creating the actual capability on top of planning/rehearsing. Would be an interesting story in the mold of the "Dam Busters".
The box has a machine inside that cuts the box open and opens up to release a drone that pops out and hits the target.
Bonus points if the box itself can fly away and self destruct so there's even less of a physical trail to figure out where the drone came from.
By all accounts the Ukrainian attack took a year to execute. It's the kind of planning that was behind the explosive pagers that Israel cooked up.
It's a new kind of automated terrorism - who knows what is planted around Russia now and when the Ukrainians will set it off.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Variety
Also, why can't drones just infiltrate a country in little spurts from the borders, pausing near power lines to inductively power themselves.
A lot of this stuff is terrifying, and conflicts like the ukraine are basically funding/inventing nightmares.
Imagine if every IoT appliance decided to burn down/self destruct and every phone with satellite connectivity decided to weaponize its battery pack. If every car with cell service connectivity decided to accelerate with brakes disabled at once. If every access point/router decided to make itself inoperable/turned into a bot net removing home internet all at once and likely shifting traffic to cell towers which could overload them resulting in zero communication. Imagine that as many devices as possible were programmed or constructed in a way to create failure on a specific date or period.
Sounds insane, but I would have said the pager thing sounds insane too. All those things definitely sounds possible to me.
At a certain point, you as a country can only be said to be capable of what you can do without external aid. The possibility that your Allies will always remain as such, either at their behest, or your own, is simply never zero.
Queue the Globalist's in the crowd going "The entire point was to maximize the amount of time before peace broke down through economic interdependence. Wrong. They optimized for that metric while maximizing the vulnerability to supply chain based attacks. They made individual countries less resilient and accepted the risk that if a much greater worldwide action potential was actually reached, everyone would be potentially fucked.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dy6uLfermPU
Spring Surprise??!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARM_1_mine
Is it such an amazing idea? Imagine the shoe is on the other foot - would you normally be able to drive a truck full of drones into a country at war, say Israel? This puts a target on civilian vehicles.
> In the process, manage to poke serious holes into Russia's nuclear deterrent.
Again, is it such an amazing idea? Do you want to make people in charge of nuclear weapons more jumpy and likely to make a rash decision?
It's amazing in how effective it was, and the asymmetry of the destruction compared to cold-war assumptions.
[1] https://www.wdmma.org/russian-air-force.php
There are no evil countries. There are people making choices, and they can always make other choices. Things aren't fixed and Russia can still have a different and better future.
Sometimes defeat is required for change and sometimes change can only come from the outside.
Which is why Ukraine spent the last year hitting softer targets like oil and factories.
Weight doesn't seem to imply effectiveness I guess.
I guess after today's attack, that treaty is dead.
> The obligation not to use concealment measures shall not apply to cover or concealment practices at ICBM bases or to the use of environmental shelters for strategic offensive arms.
Anti-drone nets or simple hangars won't violate it.
Define “we.” The defence community has been deeply engaged with what’s going on in Ukraine since ‘22. (And the supremacy of sensor fusion in India’s air battle with Pakistan.)
Alas it feels optimistic to hope that asymmetric confrontation would be downtrodden people of the earth against bad world damaging take-take-take pests. Merely a science fiction. The world having powerful forces working strongly for the world rather than self interest: hardly believable science fiction.
We’re in a strategic imbalance. Cold War air defences were trained on high-value targets, like strategic bombers and spy planes. So currently our air defences are overspecced for something like this.
Nothing about drones makes them inherently undetectable. You just need a different model. I suspect those should be commonplace within 20 years, potentially a decade.
> at least in some places private drone ownership will become illegal
I could see ownership being restricted in wartime. More likely is eager air defences shredding birds on perimeters.
Probably not. Most of the history of war is weapons getting stronger and stronger and defence getting harder and harder. E.g. in ancient times a shield or simple palisade could protect you, now even tanks and trenches are not safe. The days of being able to build a wall along a border and hold it against a peer adversary are long gone and not coming back.
Three years ago: "Oh stop nobody can do a decapitation strike. Russia's security concerns are bogus".
It's cheaper now, it's easier to pull off remotely, but most airports already were vulnerable to terrorist attacks. It feels like the primary mechanism that protected civilian airports is that the weapons you'd use aren't easy to get, and states didn't want to supply their sponsored terror groups with that kind of weaponry because it'd be dangerously close to an act of war and very hard to deny.
Individually, you were never safe by default. Your safety depends on not being an interesting target.
Hello, cyberpunk future. Imagine Luigi with Ukraine's strike capabilities. 10 years from now? 5?
Ukraine isn't wealthy, but it's still an entire country.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_optic_drone
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xh7SYWl79no
I read one operator describe the forests as being like Mirkwood from the Hobbit. Eerie.
I would see it as a reasonably sized box loaded with interceptor drones, they don't even have to explode. That's something we will see en masse shortly from the Russian side.
Actually nobody should take Russians as dumb and clumsy. They adapt fast. And they can benchmark fast too, thanks to ukrainians. The only open questions is whether the rest of the world accepts new situation, or will continue spending billions on less effective F35s
Standard kit on US military aircraft detect this and 5th gen platforms like the F-35 are designed to attack such systems.
One of the biggest misconceptions about the F-35 is that it is a combat aircraft, 1970s style but with better tech. In many regards, it is designed primarily as a state-of-the-art EW and AWACS-like system that can operate as part of a mesh. Yeah, it is still pretty good at the basic combat mission but the whole mesh EW/AWACS bit is its killer feature.
In the 20th century, you kill the AWACS/EW platforms, they are gone. A lot of effort went into both killing and protecting them. In the 21st century the AWACS/EW platform is a fluid organism comprising many stealthy cells because it is embedded into many platforms, and is much harder to kill because it isn’t a discrete target.
This claim, that FPV UASs equipped with explosives are more effective than F-35s as a blank statement does not sound meaningful.
Besides that, I doubt the US would have ever sold a single F35 to Ukraine just because of revealing radio-emission and reflection patterns to russian air defense, basically drawing F35 useless for future usage against Russia.
https://en.defence-ua.com/weapon_and_tech/new_domestic_30_km...
https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineRussiaReport/comments/1kwsum...
And an autonomous supersonic attack aircraft would cost..about as much as the F-35 because the F-35 is not principally expensive because of the pilot.
They don't have to replace them. They just have to destroy them.
You shouldn't be launching a patriot missile to take down a drone, that's the point
But they are vulnerable both in the air and on the ground. Recent Iran attacks over Israel and everyday Russian attacks show that shakhed flying vespa-drones can overload any air defense and deliver ammo for real cheap
realistically speaking, this destroys NATO
There is a pretty good argument here for at a minimum reforming NATO. Some major points include that the US appears to be bluffing about having useful support to offer Eastern Europe through the NATO structure, also appears to have different defence priorities than Europe does, NATO itself failed to preserve peace and Europe looks like it has militarily atrophied to a pretty significant extent under NATO.
It is not clear how the situation will ultimately be interpreted, but the US's involvement here is pushing Europe towards being the next middle east. That isn't a great outcome.
If they did, Putin would have resumed above-ground testing by now as a show of strength.
He doesn't dare.
Come Back Alive ex. These guys delivered first deep-strike drones
https://savelife.in.ua/en/donate-en/
Serhiy Prytula Charity Foundation ex. Bought a famous spy satellite
https://prytulafoundation.org/en
KOLO Charity Foundation managed by UA tech community
https://www.koloua.com/en/
https://www.libertyukraine.org/
https://www.paypal.com/donate?campaign_id=EEYJZXS9SNG7G
There's some interesting stuff happening on the financial side as well with the Lindsey Graham bill - this thing https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/05/28/new-us-senate-...
I'll bet Russia is curious too.
These launches specifically seem to have also used on-board AI targeting models trained on photos of the plane models to hit, I assume as a fallback in case mobile connection isn't available inside the bases (and photos on some Telegram channels seem to show usage of the FOSS autopilot system ArduPilot (https://ardupilot.org))
The targets weren’t moving. As long as you have a cell connection in the trailer and up-to-date satellite imagery, you could send the coördinates and even flight path to the drones ahead of time and then have them deal with minor obstacles on their own.
Camera locking on to a parked plane, should be fairly easy to do the job.
[1] https://nitter.net/bayraktar_1love/status/192915556386414634...
Interesting that they claim the attack was shared with the Trump admin ahead of time. That seems very unnecessarily risky as well considering where Trump's loyalties lie
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starshield
Starlink is a joke here but "satellites" in general are not
So any more future attacks of such nature would all depend on how successfully the Ukrainian operatives in Russia are able to evade Russian security services.
Almost a bonus to have Russia jam its own airbases and increase surveillance if a follow up isn't possible.
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Bairktars? Gone. Sea drones? Haven't heard of them in a while. What else?
Russians in comparison are great at scaling. Rockets flying daily, vespa-drones - daily, FAB bombs got wings and flying daily. That's the consistency what wins wars, not the greatest talent.
You haven't heard as much about sea drones because Russia was forced to stop naval operations close to Ukraine by them, after losing 1/3 of the Black Sea Fleet.
Though they still occasionally manage to make headlines doing other things, https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/ukrainian-naval-drones-shoo...
They shot down an Su-30 with a naval drone around a month ago: https://www.newsweek.com/drone-naval-sukhoi-jet-2067633
Or is conventional radar so noisy / limited that close range and object size is a real problem?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophy_(countermeasure)
The engineers that design these things seem to have more imagination than their critics.
https://x.com/ChrisO_wiki/status/1929166249348476968
video of the self-destruct: https://bsky.app/profile/militarynewsua.bsky.social/post/3lq...
https://nitter.poast.org/Osinttechnical/status/1929149970566...
its after the attack and drones gone. Those idiots were lucky, there is another video from a truck that malfunctioned and caught fire on side of the road. russian forces the door, enters and boom. Appeared booby trapped.
I apologize because my experience with corporate culture has resulted in a strong and decisive conclusion that corporate leaders such as Musk and Cook, et al., could not fight their way out of a paper bag. Really. What they can do is order other people to fight their way out of paper bags. If I were somehow ever in an overloaded life boat, the first people I would push over the side would be the Musks and Cooks. Musk's "send me an email" just does not work in a life boat in a storm. sigh.
I realize that in our cultist society this is blasphemy, but really - if you are able to think any original thought, go for it. And for those of you who do not get it. Well, the best I can say is good luck.
The U.S. has traditionally been a high trust society. But not everyone in the U.S. is a person who can trust others. The recent political machinations in the U.S. represent the low trust segment of American society. The key to undoing it is to re-inculcate trust at a personal level, and at societal level. How that is actually done is a difficult problem with no readily obvious solution.
“Everywhere” meaning undefended airspace into which one masses a significant fraction of one type of strategic armament.
This was the savvy exploitation by Kyiv, once again, of Russian operational incompetence.
> there isn't anyone who will stop you from pre-positioning weapons adjacent to American strategic assets
You want to try driving a truck up to a USAF base? (EDIT: Where strategic arms, e.g. B-2s, live.)
This is a novel threat vector. It needs to be protected against with vigilance. That to requires active effort to counter doesn’t mean it’s OP. Just that defensive perimeters need to be expanded, units not needlessly amassed, air defences kept in check and those perimeters constantly (and completely) monitored.
The air mobility command in the Bay Area is similarly totally surrounded by urban civilization.
I think it would be reasonable to assume that almost everything except for explosives were commercial off-the-shelf parts and trivial to acquire.
Isn’t Tinker mostly logistics, intelligence and AWACS? Don’t get me wrong, that’s important. But you’re not taking out a significant fraction of any U.S. armament hitting Tinker with drones.
And that's ignoring all the other functions the 25k+ people working there serve.
This drone attack worked because small explosives detonated close to an airframe can do catastrophic damage. That simply isn’t true for most equipment, civil or military. (The exception at Tinker being the AWACS.)
Tinker being nuked would be a strategic disaster. Dozens of drones causing small-arms damage around the base would be embarrassing, but nothing on the order of America losing a third of anything in its possession.
The analog would have to be us putting e.g. most of one class of unit at Tinker simultaneously for maintenance.
I count over 60 aircraft on the Google Maps image of Tinker, not all of them AWACS (there are less than 20 AWACS total so most of these planes aren't AWACS). And that's not counting what may be in hangars which could also be a target of this hypothetical attack. USAF has about 5500 aircraft, so this accounts for over 1% of the current USAF air fleet. It's not as critical an attack as what's happened in Russia, but it's still very damaging.
It's an operational airfield so it has large fuel tanks which would be targeted and are hardly immune to small explosives themselves. Attacking those and the ensuing fires would be costly to repair and recover from. That alone, ignoring any attacks on aircraft, could lead to months of downtime for the airfield and various disruptions as you relocate your operational units to an airfield that still has fuel tanks (if the aircraft survived the attack).
They’re slow to make, critical to modern war and we don’t even have two dozen of them. (I think at least a quarter of our AWACS are at Tinker. Hence the analogy to Russia concentrating its bombers.) For everything else we have redundancy in droves.
> not all of them AWACS
Yup, refuelling, logistics, cyberwar. Nice to have. But not critical and few among many.
> months of downtime for the airfield and various disruptions as you relocate your operational units to an airfield that still has fuel tanks
You’re not detonating fuel tanks at Tinker with drones. (Not unless they’re storing munitions within blast range of the tanks.)
I’m not arguing such a strike wouldn’t be damaging. It just would not be disabling to scale of this attack. It would also be unusual for the highways around bases to be unrestricted during major wartime. (Or drones to remain uncontrolled, for that matter.)
Anyway, I invite you to visit America some day. I think it's obvious to Americans that anyone can drive a truck to within a mile or two of every military installation, usually much closer.
One type of a retiring aircraft. Not comparable to a third of Russia’s entire bomber fleet.
> it's obvious to Americans that anyone can drive a truck to within a mile or two of every military installation
Fair enough, in peacetime. Russia is at war.
This attack, potentially, might spell the end of that treaty.
START has long since been a dead treaty, replaced by New START. New START has two verification methods, none of which rely on overflight by satellites; instead, verification is performed by onsite inspections of nuclear facilities.
The best way to protect them is maybe not invading and trying to commit genocide on a neighboring country.
It's like developing a good relationship with Ukraine wasn't a possibility, it had to be through corruption and now war.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/01/europe/ukraine-drones-russia-...
well current actions certainly aren't helping
That being said all you really need to do is install defensive netting at bases. You don’t even need hangers so relatively inexpensive retrofit. That will probably cause drones to shift to dropped minions but at least those are less accurate.
We get to destroy an enemy by proxy and another country will take the punishment and blame for it.
It's perfect, as long as our ally doesn't run out of blood.
I don't see Ukraine winning this conflict in the long run, though, and if it goes on for too long, we'll see bitterness on the Ukrainian side directed at those they felt should have helped. Fighting to the last Ukrainian will eventually make an enemy of them imo.
This was previously true, but I thought this policy changed as of last week?
May 26 2025: US, UK and allies to lift all range restrictions on weapons in Ukraine
Ukraine’s western allies, including the UK and the US, have agreed to lift all remaining range restrictions on the use of their weapons after President Trump issued his strongest criticism of President Putin yet.
https://www.thetimes.com/world/russia-ukraine-war/article/uk...
It was one and a half years in the making.
It is advantageous for the US to keep the war going to a point, but the real focus for the US is the Pacific and the US would prefer to not have to worry about Europe and Russia and instead focus on China. But the US isn’t able to end this war one way or another. Only Russia can end the war (aside from Ukraine no longer willingly defending their country) either willingly or by some sort of internal event, barring some miscalculation where they attack NATO forces. Some theorize Putin will do that to get defeated so he can save face but I don’t think that is likely.
Make russia small again.