A drone attack damaged Russia’s bomber fleet — and exposed air base vulnerabilities worldwide.
The Washington Post
Max Boot
June 1, 2025
On Sunday morning, Dec. 7, 1941, the Imperial Japanese Navy rewrote the rules of warfare. Almost no one had imagined that the Japanese could sneak across an entire ocean to attack an “impregnable fortress,” as U.S. strategists had described Hawaii. Yet that is just what they did. Japanese aircraft launched from six aircraft carriers managed to destroy or damage 328 U.S. aircraft and 19 U.S. Navy ships, including eight battleships. The Pearl Harbor attack signaled the ascendance of aircraft carriers as the dominant force in naval warfare.
The Ukrainians rewrote the rules of warfare again on Sunday. The Russian high command must have been as shocked as the Americans were in 1941 when the Ukrainians carried out a surprise attack against five Russian air bases located far from the front — two of them thousands of miles away in the Russian Far North and Siberia. The Ukrainian intelligence service, known as the SBU, managed to sneak large numbers of drones deep inside Russia in wooden cabins transported by truck, then launch them by remote control.
President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed that Operation Spiderweb, as the Ukrainians are calling it, destroyed or disabled a third of the bombers Russia has been using to launch long-range cruise missiles against Ukraine. Among the Russian planes that were hit, reportedly, were Tu-95 and Tu-22 bombers and A-50 airborne early warning and control aircraft, akin to the U.S. AWACs. (There is no independent confirmation yet of the damage.)
Little wonder that Russian military bloggers rushed to compare Sunday’s attack to the one on Pearl Harbor 84 years ago. The analogy is inapt in that, while the Pearl Harbor attack signaled the start of a new war, the airfield attack against Russia was simply another attempt by Ukrainians to defend themselves against the unprovoked war of aggression launched by Vladimir Putin in 2022. But the analogy might make sense in that both attacks could signal the obsolescence of once dominant weapons systems: battleships in 1941, manned aircraft today. Swarms of Ukrainian drones that probably cost tens of thousands of dollars to build in total might have inflicted $2 billion of damage on Russia’s most sophisticated aircraft.
In the process, the Ukrainians revealed a vulnerability that should give every general in the world sleepless nights. If the Ukrainians could sneak drones so close to major air bases in a police state such as Russia, what is to prevent the Chinese from doing the same with U.S. air bases? Or the Pakistanis with Indian air bases? Or the North Koreans with South Korean air bases?
Militaries that thought they had secured their air bases with electrified fences and guard posts will now have to reckon with the threat from the skies posed by cheap, ubiquitous drones that
can be easily modified for military use. This will necessitate a massive investment in counter-drone systems. Money spent on conventional manned weapons systems increasingly looks to be as wasted as spending on the cavalry in the 1930s.
Operation Spiderweb will not be a decisive blow against the Russian military any more than the Pearl Harbor attack was a decisive blow against the U.S. military. But just as Pearl Harbor signaled that Japan would be a far more formidable foe than most Westerners had expected, Sunday’s attack shows, yet again, that the Ukrainians are proving far more resilient and adaptable fighters than anyone had anticipated before the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion more than three years ago.
The front lines remain stalemated, and the Ukrainians are making up for their manpower deficit by developing a world-leading drone industry. The Ukrainians say they produced 2.2 million drones last year and aim to build 4.5 million this year. Of course, the Russians are building their own drones, with Iranian help. But they have consistently been a step or two behind the Ukrainians in the drone race, as Sunday’s operation again showed.
Operation Spiderweb was a brilliant and daring gambit to make up for the fact that Ukraine is running low on ammunition for its Patriot air-defense systems — and President Donald Trump appears in no mood to send any replacements. European countries are trying to help, but Patriots are in scarce supply. Rather than simply trying to shoot down Russian missiles in flight, the Ukrainians figured out how to disable the aircraft that launch the missiles while they are sitting on a tarmac.
During the infamous Trump-Zelensky argument in the Oval Office in February, the U.S. president told his Ukrainian counterpart: “You don’t have the cards.” Well, Zelensky just played — if you will pardon the phrase — his trump card: Ukrainian ingenuity. The Ukrainians have consistently shown themselves to be more courageous and skilled than their enemies, even if the performance of the Russian armed forces has improved since the early days of the war.
While signaling Ukrainian resolve, Sunday’s attack could also undermine nuclear stability, because the same bombers that launch conventional cruise missiles against Ukraine are also designed to launch nuclear weapons. This should serve to remind us of why it is so dangerous to have such a chaotic U.S. administration at such a dangerous moment. At a time like this, it would be nice if the president had a fully staffed National Security Council led by a tested, seasoned adviser — rather than an NSC that is led by a moonlighting secretary of state and that has just been purged of many of its most experienced staffers.
Trump has been fulminating about Russian air attacks on Ukrainian civilians, but he is not doing anything about them. The Ukrainians have taken matters into their own hands. The drone strike, while raising the strategic stakes and no doubt provoking Russian retaliation, is exactly the kind of high-pressure tactic needed to persuade Putin to negotiate in earnest, just as the two sides are set to sit down again in Turkey. Through their actions, the Ukrainians are signaling they refuse to be defeated — and that they have the resources to keep fighting.
Max Boot is a Washington Post columnist and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. A Pulitzer Prize finalist in biography, he is the author, most recently, of the New York Times bestseller “Reagan: His Life and Legend,” which was named one of the 10 best books of 2024 by the New York Times.