The machines appeared from nowhere and flew low over their targets, which had been carefully monitored by aerial and ground reconnaissance over the preceding months. Across several military bases, secure in the knowledge they were far from any active frontline, the first the recipients knew of trouble was when their hardware, lined up in neat rows, started to erupt in flames around them. It was a classic military deep-strike mission.

Using the longer lens of history, these words, seemingly about Ukraine’s breathtakingly audacious 1 June assault on Russian air bases thousands of miles away from Kyiv, could have applied equally to the British attack of 11-12 November 1940 on the Italian fleet at anchor in Taranto, Germany’s assaults on Soviet airfields on 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 successful military activity revolves around the word ‘surprise’, the key words here are ‘deep strike’. This means the targets are stationed far from potential danger, in supposedly secure locations. As a result, the shock of attack affects morale as well as causing physical damage. President Zelensky and his commanders have been remarkably open in revealing the details of Operation Spider’s Web, which allegedly has destroyed or damaged 41 key aircraft and took 18 months to plan. With impressive technological innovation, swarms totalling 117 short-range drones, hidden in shipping containers and delivered to the vicinity of five Russian aerodromes by unsuspecting truck drivers, were released by remote control to video and destroy the Kremlin’s strategic bomber and AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System) forces. Ukraine used First Person View (FPV) drones. The operator, thousands of miles distant, operates the craft wearing goggles that fully replicate the distant environment, as though seated in the cockpit. The accuracy of their attacks was frightening, with the reported destruction or damage of 41 Russian Tupulev Tu-95MS ‘Bear’ and other bomber types and a Beriev A-50U flying command centre.

The brazen assault 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 to Hezbollah’s own admissions, killed or injured 1,500 key fighters. Both operations were over a year in the planning, required top-level secrecy, and will have produced effects far beyond the investment made. However, the success of such a surprise attack 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 has to take advantage of the gap they have successfully created in Moscow’s military capability.

Before launching their daring assault, President Zelensky’s commanders identified one of Putin’s ‘centres of gravity’ – meaning an Achilles’ heel, which if removed impairs an opponent’s ability to fight. Operation Spider’s Web was geared to destroying Russia’s aerial munitions-carrying force, and was designed to draw the Kremlin’s ground-based drone, rocket and missile assets back to within the range of Ukraine’s own hitting power. A similar logic – targeting a key centre of gravity – inspired the British to strike at Taranto and the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor. Both strikes were 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, heralding the destruction of Stalin’s air arm for over two years.

When the Germans tried the same trick again, on 1 January 1945 targeting Anglo-American airbases in Operation Bodenplatte, they accounted for around 500 aeroplanes but few allied aircrew. In the latter 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 correctly identified the Russian air force’s centre of gravity.

In March and 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 missiles systems have brought some down, but Kyiv has only a limited amount of these expensive ground-to-air missile types. Although Russian media assert the range of its Dagger and other rocket types as 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.

Thus, the Russian centre of gravity in the air was assessed as its drone- and missile-carrying bombers, not the missiles themselves. Although other bomber types (including Tu-22M and Tu-160 and upgraded MiG-31K ‘Foxhound’ interceptors) are capable of carrying heavy long-range missiles, the mainstay is the Tu-95 bomber fleet, the modern equivalents of the Avro Lancasters or Flying Fortresses of the Second World War. They comprise around 55 machines, of which one had already been damaged in a Ukraine drone strike in 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 compromise the Kremlin’s ability to project long-range force by air. Its Beriev A-50 AWACS command and control types were reportedly down to six operational craft, two of which were shot down in January and February 2024, with a third now hit on 1 June 2025.

With pro-Russian spy rings active across Britain, and in the context of the UK Strategic Defence Review (SDR), details of which began to trickle into the media at the exact same hour as Kyiv’s drones were raining chaos on Moscow’s airbases, there must be concern as to whether Britain and its NATO partners have the capability to successfully defend and protect their own bases against the kind of strike that the Russians have failed to counter. There is a sense, too, that the pace of innovation and deployment of drone technology by Ukraine has far outstripped that of the West, something the SDR appears to overlook in its promises of jam tomorrow, years hence in fact, rather than today.

The success of using such tactical strikes 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 their power to crushing their other main military adversary, Hamas. In attacking Russian bombers on 1 June, and the command and control aircraft that direct them, Kyiv has severely damaged Moscow’s delivery systems for the many long-range drones, rockets and missiles that were nightly raining down on Ukraine. This may give Ukraine a temporary reprieve while Putin’s generals quake in their boots in fear of the Russian President’s wrath.

Over the preceding weeks, the weight of Russian air raids on President Zelensky’s cities has become unbearable. Both the Russian aerial attacks and Ukraine’s 1 June response were designed to crush the other side’s morale and willingness to continue the fight, and to advertise to the outside world that they have the capability to win and so should receive continued external military and diplomatic backing. Russia’s bullying military tactics can be likened to a boxer slugging away in the ring, while Ukraine is more akin to a Judo fighter, confounding its opponent with a series of unexpected lightning moves. Agile brains in Kyiv have more than advertised to the wider world that Ukraine, with its smaller population and slender resources, is nevertheless capable of great surprise and innovation, and is in no mood to subject itself to an externally-imposed peace or a ceasefire it does not need or want, except on its own terms.