That old Prussian warhorse, Major General Karl von Clausewitz, bequeathed many maxims to us of enduring value. None more so than his observation that “war is a continuation of policy by other means”. Frequently in his 1832 posthumous work “Vom Kriege (On War)”, Sophie Marie, Countess von Brühl, his wife, editor and promoter, used the term “politics” instead. We have just seen an example of this 19th century wisdom put into practice with Ukraine’s 21st century strikes against Russian airbases.
Over the preceding weeks, the weight of Russian air raids on President Zelensky’s cities was becoming unbearable. Russian aerial attacks and Ukraine’s 1st of June 2025 response were designed to crush each other’s morale and willingness to continue the fight, plus advertise to the outside world that both have the capability to win, and hence should continue to receive external military and diplomatic backing. The two sides have been using military activity to shape their political goals.
In the bigger wheels of history, Ukraine’s breathtaking 1 June assault on Russian air bases thousands of miles away from Kyiv remind us of the British Fleet Air Arm’s swoop on the Italian fleet at anchor in Taranto of 11-12 November 1940; Germany’s blitzkrieg on Soviet airfields during the opening day of Operation Barbarossa, 22 June 1941; the Japanese strike against the US Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941; or the Luftwaffe’s attempted destruction of allied airbases on 1 January 1945.
While Clausewitz also told us that most successful military activity revolves around the word “surprise”, the key words here are “deep” and “strike”. Deep strike means assaulting targets that are stationed far from potential danger, in supposedly secure locations. The shock of attack for them is crippling in psychological as well as physical terms: morale plummets. Surprisingly, since 1 June, President Zelensky and his commanders have given us many juicy details of Operation Spider’s Web, which they allege has destroyed or damaged 41 combat aircraft and was 18 months in the planning.
Make no mistake, Ukraine is now master of the modern, technological battlefield in its military philosophy, training, doctrine and equipment. Displaying remarkable blue sky thinking, Kyiv arranged for swarms totalling 117 short-range drones, concealed in specially-built shipping containers and delivered to the vicinity of five Russian aerodromes by unsuspecting truck drivers, to be released by remote control. At the flick of a switch, these devilish little devices then simultaneously rose into the air and swooped like eagles on the Kremlin’s strategic bomber and AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System) forces lined up on their airfields. Ukraine used FPV (First Person View) drones, where the controller, thousands of miles away, operated their craft wearing goggles which fully replicated the distant environment, as though seated in the cockpit. The accuracy of these plunging strikes was frightening, with the reported destruction or damage of 41 Russian Tupolev Tu-95MS “Bear” and other bomber types, and a Beriev A-50U flying command centre.
Could the UK have mounted Operation Spider’s Web? After all, the first drones were ours. They were converted de Havilland Tiger Moths, known as Queen Bees, operated by radio control for target towing between 1933-43, and for obvious reasons, dubbed “drones”. However, Kyiv has just demonstrated we are already light years behind in our attitudes to remotely piloted craft, about which I have written in The Critic before.
I know that NATO commanders are asking themselves whether they can protect their bases against a similar threat, in the way the Russians have spectacularly failed to do. The recent UK prosecution of a Bulgarian spy ring working for Moscow is a reminder that Operation Spider’s Web was only possible through months of covert reconnaissance beforehand.
Its brazenness ranks with Israel’s 17-18 September 2024 detonation of thousands of handheld pagers and hundreds of walkie-talkies supplied to Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria which, according Hezbollah’s own admissions, killed or injured 1,500 key militants. Both operations were completely innovative in military terms, mounted after months of detailed planning, required top-level secrecy, and will have produced Clausewitzian political effects far beyond the military investment made. However, the success of such a surprise attack also requires exploitation, a follow-up mission, which we have yet to see, for left to their own devices the Russians will learn and rebuild. Kyiv now needs to take advantage of the gap they have torn in Moscow’s military capabilities before it is stitched back together.
Prior to initiating their cunning scheme, President Zelensky’s commanders had identified one of Mr Putin’s “centres of gravity” – a sort of Achilles’ heel, which if successfully attacked would grievously impair Russia’s ability to fight. Operation Spider’s Web was just that, geared to destroying Moscow’s aerial munitions-carrying force, and designed to haul back the Kremlin’s ground-based drone, rocket and missile assets, kicking and screaming, to within the range of Ukraine’s own hitting power. Targeting similar centres of gravity are precisely what inspired the British to strike at Taranto and the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor, both designed to incapacitate a significant portion of their enemies’ maritime combat power. The Luftwaffe achieved a similar effect on 22 June 1941, destroying over 2,000 Soviet aircraft in 24 hours, heralding the destruction of Stalin’s air arm for the next two years.
However, when the Germans tried the same trick again on 1 January 1945 on Anglo-American airbases in Operation Bodenplatte, they got it wrong. Though accounting for around 500 aeroplanes but few allied aircrew in the New Year’s Day 1945 attack, the Luftwaffe wrongly assumed the loss of many of Eisenhower’s fighter squadrons would significantly degrade the allied aerial threat. However, the true Anglo-American centre of gravity in the air was its pilots, not their machines. The Germans hit the wrong target; the aircraft were replaced within days, but allied aircrew would not have been so expendable. For 1 June 2025, Ukrainian intelligence got it stupendously right: the Russian air force’s centre of gravity was its relatively few bombers.
Here’s why. In March-April 2022 the Kremlin began to use Kh-47M2 Kinzhal “Dagger” hypersonic ballistic and other missiles with a typical range of 300 miles. However, despite the Dagger’s legendary speed of up to Mach 10 (11,200 feet per second), Patriot and other missile systems brought some down, but Kyiv has only a limited amount of expensive ground-to-air rocket interceptors. Although Russian media assert the range of its Dagger and other rocket types is in excess of 1,200 miles, this is propaganda, arrived at by adding the combat radius of the carrying aircraft to the missile’s range, which is much shorter.
The Clausewitzian effect of Ukraine’s quasi-political actions should be rippling across the UK Strategic Defence Review
Thus, the Russian centre of gravity in the air was assessed as its drone and missile-carrying bombers, not the munitions themselves. Although other bomber types (such as the Tupolev Tu-22M and Tu-160, and upgraded MiG-31K “Foxhound” interceptors) are capable of carrying heavy long-range missiles, the mainstay is the aging propellor-driven Tu-95MS “Bear” bomber fleet, the modern-day equivalents of the Avro Lancasters or Flying Fortresses of World War II. They comprise around 55 machines, of which one had already been damaged in a Ukraine drone strike of December 2022. If reports are correct and around 32 of this fleet plus some Tu-22s and Tu-160s, are now neutralised, this will severely reduce the Kremlin’s ability to project military power at long range by air, for none of these craft remain in production. Similarly, Russia’s Beriev A-50 AWACS command and control airframes were reportedly down to six operational craft, of which two were shot down in January and February 2024, with a third now hit on 1 June 2025.
The Clausewitzian effect of Ukraine’s quasi-political actions should be rippling across the UK Strategic Defence Review (SDR), details of which began to trickle into the media even as Kyiv’s drones were raining chaos on Moscow’s airbases. Whilst Sir Kier Starmer and his ministers are congratulating themselves that the SDR “will deter Russia”, I see nothing in it comparable to Ukraine’s skills in drone warfare that will truly deter the Kremlin. Mr Putin will not suffer sleepless nights and cease to pound Ukraine because Prime Minister Starmer has committed to spending an extra 0.5 per cent of GDP on defence by 2027 with an aspiration to spend another 0.5 per cent in subsequent years. In fact, the man in the Kremlin now has every incentive to try to blow Kyiv to Armageddon quicker. So far, the SDR is emerging as a huge lost opportunity, with a sense that it is full of promises of jam tomorrow — a higher defence spend, more submarines, money, personnel, cadets, a home guard, munitions factories — years hence, but nothing today, when it really counts. As events in Ukraine have warned us, a lot can happen in two or three years.
The success of tactical actions to produce strategic effect also requires perfect timing. In September 2024, Israel removed the leadership of Hezbollah in a single stroke, a setback from which it has never recovered, and this enabled the Israeli Defence Forces to switch its power to crushing their other main military adversary, Hamas. In attacking Russian bombers on 1 June, and the C4I (command, control, communications, computers and intelligence) aircraft that directed them, Kyiv severely damaged Moscow’s delivery systems for the many long-range drones, rockets and missiles that were nightly raining down on Ukraine. This will give Ukraine temporary breathing space from the nightly visits of the Russian Luftwaffe. Meanwhile, we await the muffled thud of Russian Air Force commanders tumbling into Red Square as generals report for interviews without coffee, presumably wearing concealed parachutes and refusing cups of tea, for fear of their president’s wrath. Watch this space.
