Russia has either no capacity to build new strategic bombers at all, or has al they need to do it, depending on the timeframe you're talking about.

If they really decided to do it, they could make some kind on narrow-body bomber derivative of Il-96 in a few years.

Aren't they just buying stuff from china these days? Do they need a domestic supply?

I would assume having supply chain in place and aircraft manufacturer's like antonov, Ukraine is hiding its supersonic bombers somewhere.

It may have been even more effective than that if the intel supported specific target selection. Russia is likely already having a difficult time keeping their fleet operational, and if Ukraine was able to select aircraft that had recently flown then it's likely to have left mostly the non-flyable aircraft, causing Russia that much more difficulty to employ them.

The cost of those aircraft vs the cost of this operation has to be astounding.

As a European I often feel we don't deserve the allies we have in Ukraine.

Would it be reasonable to assume some of the damaged aircraft are not bombers?

It's pretty crazy all other spots in the top 5 are taken by the US except #3 by Russia.

I'm skeptical of how much damage drone-based munitions would do to these planes. A bit of frag shrapnel doesn't "total" them.

In WWII, a joint Australian / British force carried out an attack, posing as Japanese fishing boat, and sailed right into Singapore harbour to place explosives on the vessels there. They flew a Japanese ensign, wore sarongs and wore tan makeup. Operation Jaywick was not a huge strategic success (and the local population was subject to reprisals since the Japanese thought it was their fault) but it did raise morale a lot in allied forces, as it was an early blow against Japan (which had seemed invincible at the time).

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.

> The longest-range battery-powered drones have a range of only 14 km or so

As a Ukrainian soldier – ha ha ha

Even the longest recorded strike with fibre optic seems to be a lot longer than that.

Drones also easily get jammed. Which is why both sides are using cable based drones with spools of fiber optics cable.

> The longest-range battery-powered drones have a range of only 14 km or so (and probably cannot carry enough explosive that far to help much with an attack like yesterday's attack)

You are completely, utterly clueless.

why can't drones park on or near power lines and inductively charge?

> It is easy for Ukrainians to pass for Russian

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.

> It is easy for Ukrainians to pass for Russian

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...

Russia has a nuclear triad. Unless all of their submarines were in port and taken out during the attack, there’d be no way to prevent them from losing all three delivery mechanisms simultaneously.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_triad

I can imagine this could have been the motivation 18 months ago.

"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".

> Drive a truck full of drones deep into enemy territory

The 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.)

Imagine an assassination that is done with a drone mailed internationally to a PO Box. Send a gig driver to pick up a small box and drop it off at an abandoned lot.

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.

> An amazing idea: Drive a truck full of drones deep into enemy territory and let them loose.

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?

Fwiw, the US bomber force is ~75 B-52's, 40-something B-1's, and 20 B-2's. Pretty similar to Russia, until today.

My concern is that it doesn't just change war, but security in general. I don't think that we have realized the real implications of this technology, especially the fiber optic drones.

Not sure why the sibling comment is dead, it's an interesting topic. Here is a safe for work video of someone walking through countless strands of fibre over a field: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1l0ld99/...

I read one operator describe the forests as being like Mirkwood from the Hobbit. Eerie.

They are quite beautiful -

https://www.reddit.com/r/MilitaryPorn/comments/1kzy817/field...

https://www.tiktok.com/@united24.na/video/748403971532320286...

https://www.tiktok.com/@united24.media/video/748912820925079...

Sparkling in the sky (they track and kill the men in this video after the 10 second mark so you might stop there) - https://x.com/ng_ukraine/status/1891534054811439380

High def footage, 60 fps until they hit.

They are definitely useful for civilians, but seem dangerous. If you hit them on a motorbike etc. If you google kites and banned Chinese lines and road accidents its quite gory, but before the illegal kite lines accidents didn't seem to happen. So something should work for optic fibers.

Run one to your mates house 10km away for the pay-per-view?

Drones weren't seen as much of a threat as these airbases are many thousands of kilometers from the Ukraine border.

Drone countermeasures are an immature technology; nobody knows the solution. Notice the limted defenses elsewhere in the war. The US military is still experimenting with different solutions.

I would guess they have that stuff but the trucks the drones were transported in entered within the perimeter of the base and bypassed it.

EW is needed at the front, and these bases were deep within Russia. Lasers are not common technology for anti-drone use yet, and likely kinetic weapons are superior since lasers will not work in any sort of bad weather.

START treaty between US and Russia requires that the Bombers are stored out in the open so that they can be monitored from satellite, to check compliance.

I guess after today's attack, that treaty is dead.

As long as TACO doesn't dissolve NATO or try to invade Canada, the optimist in me believes a global conventional war is highly unlikely.

Everyone who has played Hearts of Iron knows that Spain is where you train your units for 1939

Weird, it only shows one drone coming out. Do they come out one at a time? When I think launching a drone swarm deep inside a country, I imagine the top blowing off and thousands of drones swarming out at once like insects.

Liberty Ukraine is also good. They periodically run fundraisers for engineering equipment for digging defensive positions in addition to supplying drones and whatnot.

https://www.libertyukraine.org/

https://www.paypal.com/donate?campaign_id=EEYJZXS9SNG7G

I imagine Ukraine will try similar again, though with a variation to make it harder to catch.

Apparently they're using a simple 4g/3g/2g modem with Russian SIM, which is the reason why all russian ISPs completely turn off mobile internet (& voice) when drone launches are detected (clearly hasn't helped here as the drones were launched from trucks super close to the targets).

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))

> curious how they managed to control the drones from such a distance

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.

Someone claimed they used fiber optic drones [1]. So perhaps the drones were connected to the trucks via optical fibers and the trucks carried the modems. That way, jamming over the airbases would have had no effect.

[1] https://nitter.net/bayraktar_1love/status/192915556386414634...

obviously StarLink

> obvious to me that this vulnerability exists everywhere

“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.

Simple solution is to store them hangared. Not too expensive for a rich country like US. It will also improve deployment ambiguity and facilitate covert changes in readiness levels (it's hard to tell from outside whether a plane in hangar is fuelled and armed or not).

The media freakout about the Chinese buying land near US air force bases, though, seems dead on.

next frontier step is nano-nukes: nuclear device the size of a cell-phone and be carried by a drone from walmart

I would assume this event was a one-time hack, it does not scale. Actually most of the “miracle weapons” from the very beginning of the conflict have faded away.

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.

As are any women involved

The attack was certainly planned meticulously and can be termed a successful operation. Even the Russian media acknowledges it so, reporting that 5 airfields were targeted, attack on 3 were repelled successfully while attacks on 2 were a partial success. But they also speculate that Ukraine will not be able to carry out such attacks any more. As per their analysis, the drones were launched from cargo trucks and remotely guided via mobile networks. The Russian military are already revising their base security doctrines to increase surveillance around the bases and will now be apparently jamming mobile signals over airbases. Moreover, such kind of attacks require a network of human operatives - many have already been arrested and counter-intelligence operations to track down the rest is already underway.

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.

> A modern anti-drone system should not rely on traditional reflection-detecting radars but try detecting electric motors, radio signals from 3g/4g modems etc.

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.

> or will continue spending billions on less effective F35s

This claim, that FPV UASs equipped with explosives are more effective than F-35s as a blank statement does not sound meaningful.

>less effective F35s

If the US had unleashed it's airforce, led by F35s the war probably would have been over in a week with Russia's air defences and invading army taken out.

TIL most of the drones used in Ukraine aren’t wireless. They unspool an extremely thin fiber optic filament. There is a video of some soldiers walking through a field and it looks like he’s collecting thick spider webs as he goes.

Short range drones powered by lithium ion batteries with a flight time of 20 minutes and a low ground speed are in absolutely no way a replacement for long range supersonic attack aircraft.

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.

This already exists as relatively mature military technology in vehicle active protection systems. Trophy[0] is a well-known example. The latency from detection to reaction is measured in milliseconds.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophy_(countermeasure)

I don’t know what the equipment is used, but definitely.

Ukraine destroys small plane drones and loitering munition with drones with the help of radar guidance.

Also I’ve heard about the case when training on an FPV drone and accidentally leaving designated area in the city triggered an air raid alert.

Sure, there are radars that effective for picking up small targets at short range. The C-RAM point defense system has detected and destroyed incoming mortar rounds. It's very expensive.

I think aircraft radars are deliberately designed not to pick up birds and bushes and the like. The radars on cars seem to pick up small objects.

The differences you are touching on are about interpersonal trust, and the concept of trust in society. Russia has a traditionally low trust culture. It's rooted in the most private interpersonal relationships, and is reflected in society as a whole.

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.

Interestingly, US military doctrine requires this sort of distributed authority. A straight-out-of-academy lieutenant requesting and directing the fire of an entire artillery battery, or calling in air support, doesn't happen in a "top down" structure. Of course, objectives are set by upper echelon (or political) leadership - which, of course, bear much deserved criticism, over the past decades - but ground-level war-making operates in a firmly collaborative model. Civilian (and maybe especially political) leaders seem to poorly understand this, and overlook the lessons they might draw from it.

Well she's free to stop picking fights whenever she likes. That would help.

Hopefully stop using them to bomb hospitals and civilians.

If it’s that big a deal for Russia, it always has the option of pulling out of Ukraine.

All of this can end tomorrow. Pull out of Ukraine, get rid of Putin, they’d probably even get most of the sanctions eased.

> Such as the recent article by the resident of Sri Lanka during it's civil war.

So because a post was wrongly flagged (I haven't checked but I take your word for it) we should also flag other posts that the community wants?

Or maybe we should stop using flags as downvotes? Flags are for disinformation, off topic and low quality links, that kind of things, not for "things I personally don't find interesting".

US is doing a lots of shit in Middle east right now and the new kids will grow to revenge, it will be interesting times since the drones doesn't costs much.

Anywhere, not just conflict zones. There was a decades long terror campaign against planned parenthood and other clinics in the USA and white supremacist nut jobs keep trying to start a race war every five to ten years with bombing and shooting sprees, the weekly school shooting in the USA, and there’s the using a vehicle worldwide for killing civilians by incels/fundamentalists of all stripes. This opens up a new venue for those inclined to act.

And laser guns for defence.

If anything, the past several months have shown that the Ukrainians will keep fighting without American support, and want to keep fighting, because the only other choice would be surrender and enslavement. Having said that, America and the EU do get something out of supporting Ukrainian sovereignty. And it's not just damage to Russian military capacity, it's deterrence against Russian imperial expansion all along the frontier.

If anything this happened because US has less leverage on Ukraine than ever. US has very consistently pressured Ukraine from strategic strikes into Russia. Turns out people other than Americans also have agency.

Yes, I've been saying this since the war started. The best thing for everyone is obviously no war, but the second best is a long, hard, and bitter war for your enemy, especially if you don't have to be the one to fight it.

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.

Attacks like these don't cost much blood. Unmanned equipment destroys parked equipment. Sounds like a win for everybody.

One small nitpick - nobody who matters will or is blaming Ukraine for the war except far left and far right factions.

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.

It's very likely the US played a big role in helping plan and provide intelligence for this.

It was one and a half years in the making.

Too bad Putin wasn't brilliant enough to foil the evil US plan by not invading Ukraine.

Apophenia

Nukes are useless in current world. What for? To destroy cities? How it can help to win the war where you are the aggressor? Wipe out Kyiv - Ukrainians will not stop fighting. Target troops with nukes? Like to nuke every mile of the frontline?

Either way more countries will oppose russia after use of nukes.

Being a nuclear power also does not prevent war, as you can see what happens between India and Pakistan.

On the other hand, it’s by far the most useless and obsolete third

No, Russia won't use its Nukes against Ukraine yet. Remember that the Russians believe the Ukraine conflict is a NATO proxy war against it. And over the past 3+ years, Russian media has reported that the "escalations" that they have seen in the war are deliberate attempts by the west to provoke an "undesirable" reaction from Russia (against the Ukrainians) to use as an excuse to escalate the war and possibly even directly get involved in the conflict and invade Russia.

Russian media analysis believe that Ukraine's polity is now resigned to the fact that they can't really militarily defeat Russia alone. And so they've shifted their strategy to use Ukrainian military to create high impact media headlines, to please their western "financiers" and to psychologically demoralise the Russians. That does make sense as attacks like this while being demoralising doesn't really offer any real military breakthrough to the Ukrainians, nor is it likely to stop the Russian advances.

The Russians already occupy around 20% of Ukrainian territory which the Ukrainians have been unable to take back. Since last year, the Russians have reportedly captured nearly 2000+ kms more of territory from the Ukrainian forces (including the Russian regions that were under Ukrainian control). And the Ukrainians forces can't realistically launch another major counter-offensive as they are very wary of running out of manpower (Ukrainians have 1/4th the wartime population of the Russians, and thus can't replenish their military as much as the Russians can).

Thus, it is an undeniable fact that right now, the Russian military have the advantage and the Ukrainian military is losing the war.

What remains to be seen is how much longer is the Zelensky administration willing to gamble that Russian economy will soon collapse or Putin may be deposed or NATO or EU boots will soon join the Ukranian forces to fight the Russians?

"Russian meat grinder continues to grind" isn't much of a headline but you can absolutely find regular articles about the state of the war. They just don't bubble up to headline news or RT. Russia does get its share of press by bombing childrens hospitals and infrastructure.

Now compare that to a country with no navy sinking a missile cruiser or downing an AWACS jet. Or, in this case, sending trucks thousands of miles into enemy territory to destroy strategic bombers. It's simply more interesting news despite how it makes you feel.

Russia thought they could take Kyiv in less than a week. If you're judging this war by their own goals, then they absolutely failed.

A long protracted war complete with the destruction of their strategic airforce and Black Sea Fleet was not something they would have even conceived of being the outcome back in January 2022.

That doesn't mean Ukraine "won". But barring any kind of black swan event in their favor, Russia definitely "lost".

There was quite a lot of Ukraine is doomed stuff at the start too. By the way this isn't really 'western media.' It's Ukrainian.

Here's CNN three days into the war for example https://edition.cnn.com/2022/02/25/europe/russia-ukraine-mil...

Ukraine never claimed a 5 minutes war, Russia did claim a 3 days special military operation though, that was a good 1000+ days ago though

Russia did lose its special military operation in about 5 minutes when it totally failed it's objectives. Leading to this drawn out war of attrition against a much smaller country.

If one only had listened to Russian media you wouldn't even know there is a war, just a "special operation"!