For those paying attention to events in and around Banderastan (like yours truly), news started streaming in on Sunday about some rather audacious, and quite repugnant, terrorist attacks in Russia, beginning with the destruction of bridges in Bryansk and Belgorod regions, in the south-west of the country. The initial reports suggested several dead and injured, which was bad, certainly, but did not ultimately affect Russia’s war effort. It was just yet another idiotic stunt pulled by the khokhols, who routinely use terrorism against civilians, because they can do pretty much nothing else at this point.

Then, the Telegram channels started absolutely lighting up with information about massed Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian military bases – across the country. And it quickly became apparent that something terrible may, in fact, have happened – over and above the terrorist attacks on civilian targets.

The first reports came with videos, released by Ukrainian channels, showing FPV drones flying at high speed into the wings and airframes of Russia’s ancient and venerable Tu-95MS bombers, located at one or more airfields within the country. Further reports came in about attacks at various other locations. As the day developed, and we got ever more information, the scale and scope of the attacks became clear:

The Ukrainians had succeeded in mounting an operation against the Russian Aerospace Forces strategic bomber, tanker, and transport fleets at no less than FIVE airbases across Russia – one near Ivanovo (400Km east of Moscow – I’ve been to that city), another near Murmansk (close to the Arctic Circle), a third in Irkutsk (in Siberia, near the Mongolian border), a fourth near Ryazan (west of Moscow), and a fifth in the Amur region (far in the east).

This was no fly-by-night operation. As the Ukrainians made clear in subsequent releases, “Operation Spider Web”, as they called it, took nearly 18 months to plan and execute, and involved hundreds of SBU operatives, working within both Russia and Ukraine.

And there is no question that the attacks did substantial (but not crippling – we’ll get to that shortly) damage to the Russian strategic aviation fleet. The absolute latest estimates of losses suffered by the Imperium of Man Russian Federation, as of this writing, come to:

• 3 Tu-95MS destroyed
• 5 Tu-95MS damaged, probably repairable
• 4 Tu-22M3 damaged, possibly one destroyed or irrecoverable, rest repairable

Make no mistake, these are very painful losses. The Russians no longer produce the airframes for the Tu-95 or Tu-22M base configurations – instead, they have spent the last two decades modernising and upgrading the Tu-95 to the MS standard, and the Tu-22M to the M3 standard.

(By the way, the “Tu-22” designation is extremely confusing to anyone who follows Soviet and then Russian aircraft production. The original Tu-22 was a supersonic fixed-swept-wing bomber with a rear-mounted turbojet engine configuration. But it was considered a failure, due to the extreme difficulties involved in flying and maintaining the thing. The current Tu-22M, is a totally different design, involving internally-mounted turbofan engines and a variable-geometry “swing-wing”. The latest iteration of the Tu-22M line is the Tu-22M3M, which is, effectively, a completely new aircraft, beyond the airframe.)

These upgraded aircraft are extremely capable, and genuinely dangerous to NATO. The Tu-95MS is Russia’s primary carrier of long-range stand-off strike missiles – though the missiles it carries, travel mostly at subsonic or supersonic speeds. However, the “Bear” is not capable of carrying or firing hypersonic missiles – these days, instead of being a saturation bomber, it is a cruise missile platform.

And the Tu-22M3 is Russia’s primary medium-range bomber – used mostly for carrying the gigantic Kh-22 and Kh-32 ship-killer missiles. Each of those monsters is some 11 metres in length, and is designed to come straight down, more or less, in its final trajectory, right onto the deck of an American supercarrier. If it hits correctly, that kind of kinetic impact could potentially break a carrier’s back, killing the ship and almost everyone and everything on it.

These are some of Russia’s best warplanes. The losses will hurt, no doubt. But the Russians can absorb them, because ALL of these losses happened at ONE airbase. The actual attacks were far, far less successful than the Ukies originally claimed.

The khokhols initially said they destroyed over 40 strategic bombers. The moment I saw that, I knew it was nonsense, because the Russians have some 63 Tu-95 airframes available to them, and they do not have all of them in active service. Quite a few are being serviced or awaiting upgrades at any given time. In reality, the Russians probably have around 35-40 “Bears” in service at any given time – and they are NOT stupid enough to keep them all in one place.

In fact, they distribute those bombers around the country – that is kind of the point of a strategic bomber fleet, after all – and they keep a substantial portion of those bombers at Engels airbase, near Saratov. So it was immediately obvious that the khokhols were lying their asses off (as usual). And so the satellite imagery later proved.

Critically, the khokhols did no damage to the real source of Russian air power – the Su-34 tactical bomber fleet, which is what they use to deliver the FAB and KAB bombs that do much of the real killing on the front lines. And they did not affect the true high-speed striking power of the Russian strategic nuclear fleet – the Tu-160M deep-penetration supersonic bombers, and MiG-31K hypersonic missile platforms.

Nor did they kill any of the pilots. The human element of Russia’s air arm remains thoroughly intact.

Also, the Ukies originally planned attacks against 5 airfields, but apparently they only managed to successfully attack two, so the operation was nowhere near as successful as the Ukrainians and their Western shills think. And contrary to Ukrainian claims, the drones they used did not utilise AI technology of any kind. They were short-range drones only, and the Ukrainians evidently used Russian SIM cards, acquired from within Russia, to carry out the attacks.

What, then, do these attacks mean?

Tactically, it is a victory for the Ukrainians – of that, there can be no question. Fair play to them. They pulled off a real coup that hurt the Russians badly. They exposed clear holes in the Russian intelligence and security services – the drones were apparently assembled inside Russia over the course of many months, the trucks were rented from Russian companies. The prime suspect in the coordination and setup of these attacks, was apparently a Ukronazi sympathiser who posted pro-Banderite crap all over his Telegram channel, yet was allowed to move first to Donetsk Region, and then to deeper within Russia, without issues.

The Russian FSB needs to take a long hard critical look at itself to figure out how it managed to get befooled so thoroughly and properly. Not only did they fail to prevent two terrorist attacks on civilian infrastructure, they also dropped the ball completely on major attacks that destroyed several priceless bombers. Already, there are calls within Russia for heads to roll over this – the grim joke is that, if Stalin were still in charge, we would be seeing a bunch of FSB officers and staffers lined up against the wall and shot for this failure.

But, strategically, in the long-term war, this changes nothing. To steal a phrase from Alexander Mercouris, this is very much like a lightweight boxer fighting a super-heavyweight, and landing a sharp check-hook that stuns the big guy, costing him a round. Over time, though, the bigger guy’s power and mass will simply be too much for the smaller one to stop. And, eventually, the bigger guy will be in a position to unleash a flurry of devastating punches that floors the smaller one.

The front-line reality bears witness to this. The khokhols are being chewed up and destroyed at an ever-increasing rate – at least 1,500 dead and irretrievably wounded every day across the front lines, and that does not count the losses behind the lines, which the Russians cannot see and verify. The attrition rates are now anywhere from 1:10 to 1:20 in favour of the Russians. And they have started gaining territory at rates not seen in a year.

By the end of this war – in which a Russian victory is INEVITABLE, at this point – the total death toll on the Ukrainian side is certain to be well north of 1.5 MILLION. To put that into perspective, the Russian Empire, in WWI, suffered around 1.8 million dead among its soldiers, and 2.3 million dead in total, at a time when it had many times more people than Ukraine does today.

This is before we get to the territorial gains. Right now, as I write this, the Russians are within 25Km of the city of Sumy – literally within sight of the outskirts of the city itself – after smashing through very weak Ukrainian defences south of the Kursk Salient that the idiot khokhols wasted over 70,000 lives trying to take and keep.

It is also important to note, as several analysts – the aforementioned Alexander Mercouris and Larry Johnson, among others – have pointed out, that the entire reason the Russian bombers were out in the open, was because Russia still abides by the stipulations of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties (START). There is a clause in those treaties that specifies the Americans and Soviets had to keep their strategic bomber fleets uncovered, so that satellite reconnaissance could check to ensure that the bombers were on the ground, and not potentially en route to deliver nuclear weapons. Even after the end of the Cold War, after the collapse of the USSR, the Russians have complied with their treaty obligations.

Notably, the US, by and large, has not – it, and not Russia, has unilaterally torn up multiple arms control and limitation treaties, such as the ABM Treaty, the Open Skies Treaty, and the INF Treaty.

In other words, the Ukrainians exploited the fact that the Russians continue to abide by their treaty obligations, in good faith, and used that to attempt an attack on their strategic nuclear aviation. And there can be no question that they did so with the active assistance of Western intelligence services.

It is also inconceivable that the Ukrainians came up with the necessary logistics, intelligence, and spy craft necessary to pull something this big and this audacious off by themselves. Indeed, the latest data coming out of Russia show that the plastic explosives used to detonate the bridge support structures that resulted in those attacks on civilian trains, was of American origins.

This is almost an insane level of brinkmanship. The implications are as clear as they are horrifying:

The Russians were attacked, on their own soil, by European and American intelligence services, using the Ukrainians as their proxies.

Even so, the damage was limited. I suspect the Russian response will also be measured and calm (insofar as hundreds of drones and missiles destroying things in Ukraine can be called “calm”) – much to the irritation, and indeed the mounting fury, of many within Russia.

The Russian senior leadership has no reason to escalate things. They are winning the war – very obviously so. There is no need for them to level Queef, even though Russia could easily do so. And the Neo-Tsar very obviously does not want to send Oreshnik missiles to rain down hellfire on London, Paris, Brussels, and Berlin – much though the Euzis and Pommies thoroughly deserve it. He is instead quite content to play the long game – exterminating the Ukrainian Armed Forces, extinguishing their combat potential, and (awful as it sounds) wiping out the future gene-stock of the Ukrainstvo, the Ukrainian way of life and thinking.

The fact is that the attacks on Russia did very little of anything, except to further piss off the Russian people, and to further unite them in their determination to achieve a final and decisive victory.

Indeed, if anything, The Putin has to worry more about the hardliners in his own government, who accuse him constantly of being far too soft, soppy, and wet, to take the actions necessary to bring this war to a clear and conclusive end. Those hardliners are now almost certainly the overwhelming majority of his cabinet and Security Council – the body that actually runs Russia – and they all, universally, loathe the West and have no patience for the Europeans.

It is of vital importance that you understand this fact, which I have been repeating ad nauseam for YEARS now:

President Putin is the MODERATE in the Russian government today.

If he goes, for any reason, then a hardliner WILL take over. And at that point, all bets are off, because the Russians are sick and tired of taking what the West dishes out, without retaliating.

Now, the attack on the airbases did not cross Russian red lines – the West keeps making up these imaginary Russian lines, and then crossing them, and then claiming that the Russians didn’t do anything, therefore they are weak. This is idiotic and childish. The Russians have never claimed that attacks on their strategic bomber fleet are a red line for them. Indeed, their bombers are a legitimate military target, and the Russians know that perfectly well.

So these attacks did not, in and of itself, break the Laws of War. The method used to carry it out, almost certainly did, because they used civilian objects to launch military attacks, but the actual attacks themselves were legitimate. (I do not speak here of the attacks on civilian infrastructure – those were terrorist acts and war crimes, plain and simple.)

But, even if those attacks did not cross Russian red lines, a line certainly has been crossed, mentally and morally. Operation Spider Web combined terrorism against civilians with attacks on Russia’s strategic bomber fleet. This is a combination that cannot be borne without answer. And the Russians have taken notice.

Will they do anything about it?

They can hardly afford not to do so. But I do not expect any significant changes from their current approach of “kill the enemy wherever you find him – slowly and methodically”. There is a certain horrifying artistry to the way Russians conduct war – they do it scientifically, precisely, and with an almost inhuman level of surgical precision. They have been doing this sort of thing for a very long time, and there is nobody better at it.

Their entire approach in this war, ever since September 2022, has essentially been to bleed Ukraine – and, by extension, NATO – dry. They are succeeding, brilliantly, at relatively limited cost to themselves. If it ain’t broke, after all, they ain’t gonna fix it.

So ultimately, these attacks were nothing more than the usual Ukrainian PR stunts, masquerading as military means. It is rather similar to some of the things the Third Reich did in its dying days, and for the same reasons. In the long run, such attacks accomplish nothing. Already, the Russians have reopened the railway lines, extinguished the fires at their airbases, and resumed their bombing and offensive operations.

Their FAB and KAB glide-bomb carriers, the Su-34s, are unaffected – as are their hypersonic Kinzhal missile carriers, the MiG-31Ks. So their air arm has lost NONE of its power, range, and lethality against Ukraine. And they have lost only a limited amount – less than 5% – of their strategic nuclear arm against NATO.

This is nothing more than a serious punch to the nose that left the Russians momentarily stunned. We should all be a lot more worried about WHEN, not if, they release that final flurry of punches that will floor their opponent. And that IS coming.