Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called the massive attack, which he said used 117 drones, his country's "longest-range operation."
"It had an absolutely brilliant outcome," Zelenskyy said on Telegram. "Russia has had very tangible losses, and justifiably so."
Oksana Markarova, Kyiv's ambassador to the United States, called the attack a "very successful defensive operation in Russia against Russian aircraft that, on a daily basis, bomb our hospitals and schools and kill our kids."
Speaking at an AI event in Washington, Markarova said it was "the best example of how innovation can and should work in defense."
With Ukraine set to meet Russia for U.S.-brokered peace talks the next day and amid aggressive Russian advances on the battlefield, the ambitious June 1 attack showed neither side is counting on a breakthrough in negotiations.
"We hope that the response will be the same as the US response to the attack on their Pearl Harbor or even tougher," Russian war blogger Roman Alekhin wrote on Telegram, comparing the Ukrainian strike to the 1941 Japanese raid on a U.S. base in Hawaii.
“It is impossible to restore these losses,” reported Rybar, a pro-Kremlin Telegram channel.
The comparisons between the Ukrainian drone attack and the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack bandied by pro-
Russian bloggers were not historically accurate.
Japan's Dec. 7, 1941, bombing of the U.S. naval base in Hawaii, which pulled the U.S. into World War II, destroyed and damaged more than 300 American planes and killed more than 2,400 servicemembers, according to the National World War II Museum.
Ukrainian 'Spider's Web'
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The operation, code-named "Spider's Web," was characteristic of the style of warfare Ukraine has made its brand as it attempts to undercut Russia's larger military – flooding the zone with cheap, deadly drones.
But the scope of this attack set a new precedent. The drones, strapped with explosives, were hidden inside trucks that parked at the outer edge of Russian military bases, a
Ukrainian security official told Reuters. Video shows one of the abandoned trucks self-destructing when a person went inside after the drones were launched.
The roofs then opened by remote control, unleashing the drones to swarm the military bases.
Ukraine's intelligence service said 41 Russian aircraft were hit at four air bases stretching from the Finnish border to Siberia. One targeted base, in the Irkutsk region, lies more than 2,600 miles from the front lines, making it the farthest target Ukraine has hit during the conflict.
Russia's defense ministry acknowledged in Telegram messages June 1 that drones launched "from an area in close proximity to airfields resulted in several aircraft catching fire."
The operation came a day after Russia launched a massive overnight attack on Ukraine using 472 drones and seven missiles, according to Ukraine's air force – the most drones launched in one operation throughout the conflict.
Separately on June 1, Ukraine struck two highway bridges in Russian regions close to its borders, killing seven people and injuring 69. One bridge collapsed on a train carrying nearly 400 passengers to Moscow, according to Russian investigators.
Three of the missiles and 372 drones were downed, the air force said.
Michael Boyle, an associate Professor at Rutgers University and author of a book on drone warfare says “There's a lot of counter-drone technology that gets rendered pretty useless against drones operating on a closed loop with fiber optic cables, and [militaries] are going to need to rethink the counter-UAS strategies to deal with fiber-optic drones, even if attacks like we saw in Russia remain rare and hard to replicate.”
Military air bases are protected with layered systems that often include radar to detect approaching threats, as well as missile systems and jamming devices designed to disorient radio-controlled drones.
The June 1 attacks rendered nearly all such defences void. In flying from short range, the drones arrived without the warning that long-range radar can provide, and in swarms likely to overcome even missile defense systems able to shoot down such small devices. In some videos made on June 1, small arms fire can be heard as Russian servicemen apparently attempt to shoot down the quadcopters.
Colonel Markus Reisner, the head of Research and Development for the Austrian Military Academy told RFE/RL the attack offers “a taste of the future of warfare.”
Reisner says since the start of the war Moscow has struck Ukraine using “long-range Tu-22, Tu-160, and Tu-95 bombers.
During these regular attacks, the heavy bombers launch their long-range cruise missiles from a safe distance and outside the range of Ukrainian air defenses. Ukraine has therefore repeatedly attempted to take out these heavy bombers and the important A-50 flying communication centers in recent years.”
Depending on which of the varying estimates of destroyed aviation destruction turns out to be accurate, Reisner believes the Ukrainian operation will “contribute to significantly reducing the intensity of Russian air strikes on Ukraine.”
Colonel Markus Reisner, the head of Research and Development for the Austrian Military Academy told RFE/RL the attack offers “a taste of the future of warfare.”
Following
Ukraine’s stunning attack over the weekend that used small drones to target and destroy Russia’s strategic bombing aircraft, the U.S. Army is applying big picture observations to its ongoing force transformation.
For starters, leaders believe it is a validation of some of the radical change the service is seeking in how to procure and manage capabilities differently in the future.
“Yesterday was a really good example of just how quickly technology is changing the battlefield. We’ve seen this over the last couple of years that everybody talks about [Program Objective Memorandum] cycles and everybody talks about program of record. I think that’s just old thinking,” Gen. Randy George, chief of staff of the Army, said Monday during the Exchange, an AI conference hosted by the Special Competitive Studies Project.
POM cycles refer to the five-year planning process for programs and capabilities in the Pentagon.
George noted that technology is changing too rapidly on the modern battlefield to be wedded to these large procurement programs that historically have taken years to develop and once fielded, can be largely obsolete.
He wants to shrink the timeline it takes to develop systems and get them in the hands of soldiers, especially given much of these capabilities, such as drones, communications gear and electronic warfare tools, are increasingly available on the commercial market.
“What we got to do is make sure that we’re aligned and that’s what we’re trying to do, changing the processes up here to make sure that we’re getting them the equipment, the war-winning capabilities that they know they need,” he said. “We’re going to have to be more agile. Drones are going to constantly change. We’re going to be trying to play the cat-and-mouse game with counter-UAS, so we’re going to have to work through that to make sure that we’re buying systems. We’re going to need a lot more agility in how we buy things.”
The Army has been experimenting with this approach through what it calls transforming-in-contact, which aims to speed up how the service buys technologies and designs its forces by injecting emerging capabilities into units and letting them experiment with them during exercises and deployments.
George said one of the Army’s units that just went to the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Johnson, Louisiana — which provides the most realistic combat scenarios the Army can create for units to train where forces simulate a battle campaign against an active enemy — had close to 400 drones in it. That is substantially higher than the number of drones other formations have had recently, with 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division possessing over 200 during a January rotation in Europe, previously the most to date.
he Army doesn’t want to field the same systems like that for years because the technology changes so rapidly.
“We’re constantly updating those. I think that that’s how we have to be focused moving forward,” George said.
He also noted that Ukraine’s drone attack over the weekend flips the cost curve.
Kyiv used relatively cheap systems to destroy millions to billions of dollars worth of Russian combat power.
“Look at how cheap those systems were compared to what they took out. We have to be thinking about that [with] everything we’re doing,” George said.
The attack, furthermore, exemplified how transparent battlefields are becoming, meaning there is nowhere to hide.
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