It seems unfathomable that Putin and his wartime government will now continue with any negotiation to end the war. How could any great power be expected to?
They’re calling it “Russia’s Pearl Harbor,” and with good reason. Ukrainian attackers secreted strategically-placed container trucks full of offensive drones deep within Russia. These systems, probably utilizing Starlink internet, then struck at Russia’s key Olenya and Belaya airbases, in which a large portion of Russia’s long-range nuclear-capable strategic bomber fleet was housed.
Officially, Ukraine claims to have damaged or destroyed around 40 Russian bombers, including Tu-22s, Tu-95s, and even an A-50 radar plane. Ukraine claims that their strike knocked out upwards of 30 percent of Russia’s long-range nuclear-capable strategic bomber force.
For its part, Russia claims it wasn’t that many bombers—and that the Russian military possesses “hundreds” of long-range bombers in cold storage. If necessary, the Russians will spend the time and money to upgrade those outdated Cold War relics into modern fighting machines, as they have done with multiple other platforms that have proven their mettle in the Ukraine War.
The numbers of the damage done to Russia’s air-based nuclear deterrent vary, depending on the source. Whatever the case, we know that the attacks were sizable enough to warrant an emergency meeting of Russia’s national security council. Out of that meeting came a decision to launch a massive retaliatory strike involving massive numbers of Iskander-M missiles, targeting drone bases in the Sumy and Kharkiv regions of Ukraine. The wartime Zelenskyy government in Ukraine insists they are prepared for sweeping retaliation beyond the Iskander-M strikes thus far.
And one can anticipate that the Russians will expedite their counterattack plans—which seemed to be on hold for as long as the Trump administration and the Zelenskyy government were willing to negotiate a diplomatic end to the Ukraine War.
Ukraine Takes the Role of Imperial Japan
But if the narrative surrounding the recent drone attacks deep within Ukraine are akin to Russia’s Pearl Harbor, then this does not bode well for Ukraine. Just as with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in the Second World War, Ukraine is a smaller country with a hard limit to what it can achieve against its larger eastern foe. Ultimately, the Pearl Harbor attacks were a strategic disaster—they pulled an isolated and peaceful country out of its slumber and led it to crush the Japanese Empire.
There is zero evidence to support the claim that this recent attack on Russia, in the middle of what appeared to be good faith attempts at negotiation by the Trump administration and the Putin government in Russia, will end much differently for Ukraine. Whether that brutal end for Kyiv comes in a few weeks or a few years, it seems unfathomable that Putin and his wartime government will now continue with any negotiation to end the war. How could any great power be expected to, given the unreliability of Ukraine and its European NATO partners?
Remember, the Americans completely abandoned what was their ongoing negotiations with the Japanese immediately after the Pearl Harbor surprise attack occurred. Washington demanded unconditional surrender from Japan, and watched a bloody march across the Pacific for four rough years thereafter. The fighting only ended after the recalcitrant militarist regime in Japan was nuked. Twice. How’s that for an ominous parallel?
Today, many Western analysts—even those whose sympathies have clearly lain with Ukraine these last three years—fear that the Russians, out of anger, will finally let the nuclear genie out of the bottle where it has slept since August 1945.
America Is No Longer Safe
Because of the success of Ukraine’s strike, others will certainly try to emulate it. America must now prepare itself for similar attacks in the future—involving hostile drones being deployed from otherwise benign-looking container trucks parked near military bases.
There have already been instances of Chechen hit squads attempting to murder a high-ranking member of the US Special Forces community in his home on Fort Bragg for alleged involvement with Ukraine’s military while on deployment last year.
Ukraine’s attack on Russian airbases deep within Russia will undoubtedly inspire either Russian retaliation against Ukrainian targets—or even, unrelated to the Ukraine War, terrorist attacks targeting sensitive American military facilities.
By willingly targeting Russian bases with nuclear-capable bombers, Ukraine has seemingly broken a taboo on targeting another nation’s nuclear forces. Throughout the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union knew better than to conduct such strikes on each other. The two powers fundamentally understood that, once they began attacking nuclear weapons bases, command-and-control functions, or nuclear weapons depots, the other side would perceive it as an attempt to knock out their nuclear armaments in preparation for a first strike—triggering a race up the escalation latter. Better to restrain a conventional war to conventional armaments, and avoid the possibility of nuclear holocaust.
But this wisdom seems to have been buried with the Soviet Union. In fact, Ukraine is the second military to have broken such a nuclear taboo in recent weeks. In the recent four-day war between India and Pakistan, India willingly targeted a nuclear weapons depot in the Kirna Hills region of Pakistan by dropping a massive bomb that blew up the entrance to that mountain complex.
From there, India successfully struck the Nur Khan airbase near Islamabad, which served as a key conduit in Pakistan’s rudimentary nuclear weapons command-and-control network. Immediately thereafter, President Donald Trump intervened and demanded that the Indian government not only stop the attacks, but also that they unilaterally impose a ceasefire.
To Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s credit, that is precisely what happened. Had Modi resisted or simply ignored Trump’s decree, nuclear war would have been the most probable result.
What Did Trump Know—and When?
Yet when it comes to Ukraine’s destabilizing actions, Trump is suspiciously silent. Indeed, in the first hours following the strike, reports erupted in Western media claiming that President Trump had been briefed about Ukraine’s planned drone attacks on Russia before they had occurred. Later, though, many of those same outlets retracted their initial claims, and reported that President Trump had not been told of the attack until after Ukraine had initiated it.
Conveniently, in this narrative, the United States is exonerated from any responsibility for the strikes. It is all on the Ukrainians. Of course, on some level, elements within the US intelligence community as well as in the various European NATO countries likely knew what was being planned. We know that Western intelligence services assisted the Ukrainians in targeting Russia with long-range cruise missiles and drones earlier in the war. Why assume that those same elements have stopped?
Even if the reports that Trump and his team were not briefed on the strike are true, it raises another, possibly more troubling concern. Either Ukraine, America’s nominal ally, kept Washington in the dark, or its own intelligence sources did. And this isn’t the first time that the president was kept out of the loop. According to Trump himself, last weekend’s alleged assassination attempt against Vladimir Putin—in which unmarked drones, likely Ukrainian in origin, targeted the presidential helicopter—was something he had not been briefed on until well after the attempt was made.
It is obvious that, on some level, the Kyiv government under Volodymyr Zelenskyy does not want the peace negotiations to go forward as Trump envisions. If they had, why would they conduct such a strike?
Trump must respond accordingly. The next month will determine whether the president’s legacy will be that of an effective peacemaker—or a braggadocious leader who blundered America into World War III.
About the Author: Brandon J. Weichert
Brandon J. Weichert, a Senior National Security Editor at The National Interest as well as a contributor at Popular Mechanics, who consults regularly with various government institutions and private organizations on geopolitical issues. Weichert’s writings have appeared in multiple publications, including the Washington Times, National Review, The American Spectator, MSN, the Asia Times, and countless others. His books include Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower, Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life, and The Shadow War: Iran’s Quest for Supremacy. His newest book, A Disaster of Our Own Making: How the West Lost Ukraine is available for purchase wherever books are sold. He can be followed via Twitter @WeTheBrandon.
Image: Shutterstock / Parilov.
