Ukraine’s Stunning Assault Roils Russia’s Global Military Strategy
KYIV, Ukraine—Ukraine’s
unprecedented drone strikes on Russian air force bases weaken Moscow’s ability to wage war on its smaller neighbor and undermine its capacity to threaten more distant rivals such as the U.S. and China—a shift with potentially far-reaching geostrategic implications.
The coordinated attacks Sunday by Ukrainian drones on Russian airfields housing strategic Tupolev bombers damaged or destroyed a sizable portion of the warplane fleet Moscow uses to launch guided-missile attacks on Ukraine. They are also the planes Russia would rely on to strike adversaries in the event of a nuclear war.
Russia no longer produces the decades-old Tupolev planes, meaning it has lost a cornerstone of its ability to project military power beyond its borders. Newer Russian planes are more modern and agile but lack vital characteristics of the destroyed bombers, most significantly their range and the quantity of munitions they can carry. The attack also apparently destroyed a rare Antonov plane Russia uses for airborne command-and-control, another capability vital to modern warfare.
Of more than 100 Tupolev bombers that Russia is known to have, Ukraine said it had damaged or destroyed more than 40. A full assessment will take time, but open-source intelligence analysts counted at least 14 damaged aircraft using satellite images and video posted online. It is unclear how many of the Tu-22s and Tu-95s were operational before the strikes.
Russia confirmed some losses at the air bases, saying it repelled part of what it called a terrorist attack. It offered no evidence of repelling the strikes.
Lt. Gen. Vasyl Maliuk, head of Ukraine’s main security and intelligence agency, the SBU, said Monday that the order to destroy the warplanes had come directly from President Volodymyr Zelensky.
“The enemy bombed our country from these planes almost every night, and today actually felt that ‘payback is inevitable,’ ” Maliuk said.
In the short term, Russia will be forced to rethink how it operates, stores and defends its remaining strategic-bomber fleet. Russia, like the U.S., often leaves long-range bombers parked outside and easily visible, both for operational reasons and as part of nuclear-disarmament agreements with Washington around the end of the Cold War.
Moscow has already been compelled by Kyiv’s steady drone strikes inside Russia to relocate most of the planes to bases far from Ukraine. Indeed the remoteness of the bases hit Sunday is part of what made the carefully planned strikes so unexpected. The most distant is roughly 3,000 miles from Kyiv.
Keeping planes far from Ukraine has meant that Russian bombers must take long flights to reach targets, giving Ukraine and Western intelligence agencies chances to observe and prepare for their movement, also adding complexity to Moscow’s attack plans.
Russia now will need to devote more resources to protecting bombers and other valuable military assets. The country has a vast air-defense system that it has expanded in recent years, but it lacks sufficient equipment to cover the entire country and protect against all dangers, from long-range missiles to small, slow drones like those used Sunday.
Zelensky said Sunday that the attacks on four bases had been prepared and launched inside Russia. The intelligence feat will sow fear within the country and likely prompt Moscow to tighten internal controls and repression.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, who is seen by many Western intelligence analysts as deeply paranoid, is likely to grow more concerned about internal enemies and take harsh measures in response to the public humiliation. Close-to-home intelligence failures around the world generally prompt purges and upheaval in security services, and Russia has already undertaken many since its initial large-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022 failed.
Russia has used the warplanes to relentlessly bombard Ukraine with bombs, missiles and drones, hitting a range of civilian targets and killing or wounding thousands of civilians.
The planes Ukraine hit fill a role in Russia’s air force fleet roughly comparable to America’s B-52 and B-1 bombers, both of which are more modern and more consistently updated than the Tupolevs. The U.S. also has stealthy B-2 flying-wing bombers and is developing a successor, the B-21. Tu-95s, which first flew in the 1950s, are so old that instead of jet engines—which the Soviet Union hadn’t yet mastered at the time—they use four engines, each with a pair of propellers that rotate in opposite directions for speed.
Both countries’ bombers represent vital parts of their ability to deliver nuclear weapons in a war. The other two legs of the so-called nuclear triad are submarines and land-based missiles. Russia’s navy has struggled in recent years to maintain and modernize its equipment. The readiness of its land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles and their launch silos is difficult to gauge.
Kyiv’s success hitting Russian bases from nearby comes atop a string of Ukrainian long-range attacks on Russian military and energy facilities. Ukraine last year destroyed a Russian early-warning radar antenna that had been built to detect a potential U.S. nuclear attack.
In 2023, Ukraine severely damaged the
Kerch Strait Bridge using naval drones, following
a truck-bomb attack in 2022 that created a spectacular fireball. The explosion, which ignited fuel cars on a passing train, closed for many months a causeway that Putin had built with great fanfare following his seizure of the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine in 2014.
