Some eighteen months in planning—and a strong repudiation of that infamous White House meeting when Trump hurled insults at Zelenskyy and said that his country had no cards left—and with off the shelf hardware and software trained on old Soviet bombers on display in a museum to calibrate and target the semi-autonomous operation, Ukrainian security services carried out a sneak attack deep inside Russian territory, coordinated across five geographic regions, destroying up to a third of long-range air assets, a legacy fleet not quickly rebuilt, if at all. 
This stunning blow, codenamed Spider’s Web, was carried out on Sunday by three dozen basic quadcopters with heavy armament were covertly transported to their deployment sites near multiple area bases in containers disguised as mobile wooden cabins with retractable roofs on flatbed trucks, not an uncommon site and arousing no suspicions. Once in place, operators helped guide the drones through the domestic mobile telephone network, forgoing the need for satellite telemetry and avoid potential signal jamming technologies, from a command base located provocatively near to an FSB field office. The estimated damage to Russia’s missile carriers—which also includes a class of strategic nuclear bombers from the Cold War which cannot be kept in hangars under the terms of the START treaties—runs over seven-billion euro.
This ingenious attack—which has drawn some comparisons to the booby trapped pagers that Israel used against Hezbollah, though Ukraine was far more surgical and had no collateral casualties—and was the biggest surprise victory since the sinking of the Moskva, followed with an encore of the third bombing of the Kerch bridge to Crimea. In the past weeks, Russia has significantly increased deadly strikes on Ukraine and comes just days ahead of planned peace talks in Istanbul. While a symbolic win and a potential set back that may spare some beleaguered communities from bombardment, this operation also illustrates a major shift in war fighting strategies and asymmetric engagement.
