An audacious and revealing attack (updated)

Ukraine has just carried out a stunning drone attack on four Russian military airbases, seriously damaging more than forty bombers, many of them capable of carrying nuclear weapons. It's not yet clear whether the planes are wrecked beyond repair, but based on the video footage above, it seems likely.  Here is some more information -- but bear in mind that early reports on breaking stories often contain errors or are incomplete.

The attack is revealing in several ways.  First, one of the airbases that was struck, Belaya, is about 2,700 miles from Ukraine, a distance comparable to the east-to-west width of the continental United States (the chyron in the video above has a typo -- the base is in Siberia, not Serbia).  This is certainly outside drone flight range, and indeed early reports are that the drones were launched from trucks and vans, having been taken across the border and driven across Russia earlier, to sites near their targets.  This tells us (a) that Russia has no effective control or monitoring of what gets sneaked into the country or transported around within it, and (b) that nowhere in Russia is safe from such attacks.  If the Ukrainians could do this, they can destroy pretty much any target they choose.  And it's hard to see how Russia could retaliate.  Its attacks on Ukrainian civilians and infrastructure are probably already as vicious as it is capable of inflicting.

Second, this affirms that military aid to Ukraine is one of the best defense investments the West can make.  I haven't been able to find a reliable hard figure for how many nuclear-capable bombers Russia has in total, but the ones just destroyed probably represent a non-trivial fraction of them.  This reduces a potential nuclear threat to the West, just as the Ukrainian war effort has been reducing conventional threats for years by weakening the Russian military.

Third, it's a graphic demonstration of the "equalizer" role of drones, and not only in warfare.  I doubt that, for example, US airbases would be similarly vulnerable -- Russia is notorious for its incompetence in such matters, while Western militaries are a lot better at protecting their assets.  But as I pointed out in this post, the US oligarchical class presents many soft targets, while drones and the means of weaponizing them are widely available here.

As for Ukraine and Russia, this escalation may be only the beginning.  For all we know, there may be more trucks and vans with drones in them scattered all over Russia, just waiting for orders to go into action.  At some point the military leaders around Putin will need to decide whether continuing the Ukraine invasion is worthwhile if it means the systematic destruction of more and more of Russia's strategic military forces.  There must be some limit to the price they're willing to pay to allow one megalomaniac to keep doubling down on the ghastly mistake he made in February of 2022.

Update:  Kyiv Independent is reporting that the planes damaged in the attack account for one-third of Russia's nuclear-capable bombers (but remember that they also have land-based and submarine-based nuclear missiles).  Of course, the main reason Ukraine destroyed these planes is that they're being used to attack Ukrainian cities, but the damage to Russian nuclear capabilities also benefits the West.

Pro-Putin bloggers are going completely bonkers (scroll down to the comments there), predicting that Putin will nuke London or something equally absurd.  Such people have convinced themselves that Russia is winning, so this attack comes as a shock to them.

This post seems like a good assessment of the significance of the attack.

I've seen a few reports that Ukraine is continuing to hit other targets on a large scale.  For example, it's been claimed that this video shows the destruction of a Russian ICBM factory.