Bernard-Henri Levy writes in The Wall Strett journal about Ukraine’s remarkable success in destroying about 1/3 of Russia’s long-range strategic bombers. These are planes that have been delivering death and destruction to civilian targets like schools, homes, and hospitals. Ukraine knocked them out with a single, brilliant strike.
He writes:
The Ukrainian operation on Sunday was a coordinated attack on four airports in Russia reaching as deep as Siberia. It neutralized 41 “strategic aircraft” and was a brilliant technical performance.
Over more than 18 months, hundreds of drones were smuggled deep into Russia. They were loaded onto civilian trucks with double-bottomed trailers, where they were concealed inside mobile boxes. The tops of those boxes—remotely controlled by operators in Ukraine but connected to the Russian telephone network—opened at the appointed time, allowing the drones to take off. All 41 targets were carefully studied for months by Ukrainian intelligence, and they exploded simultaneously without civilian casualties…
This achievement was a slap in the face to Russia—and not the first. At the beginning of the war, there was the Moskva cruiser, the flagship of its fleet, sunk off Odesa by two Ukrainian-made missiles. Then, the double strike on the Kerch Bridge, Vladimir Putin’s pride, the jewel of his cardboard crown and a symbol of the continuity he believed he was establishing between Crimea and Russia. Last year, half of Mr. Putin’s fleet in the Black Sea was destroyed. The other half retreated pitifully to Novorossiysk or the Sea of Azov. Also in 2024, Ukraine staged an offensive in Russia’s Kursk region.
Sigmund Freud spoke of the three humiliations on Western man—inflicted by Copernicus, Darwin and Freud himself. If Volodymyr Zelensky had the heart to laugh, he could speak of the five humiliations he has inflicted on that enemy of the West: Russia. Mr. Putin and his people stand exposed as braggarts, paper tigers. Ukraine is David to the Goliath of Russia, nearly 30 times its size.
Sunday’s operation is further proof that the Ukrainian army, through sacrifice and adversity, has forged itself into the boldest, brightest and best in Europe. I witnessed its evolution as I prepared my documentaries on the war.
I filmed its geeks tinkering, hidden in forest huts, their first makeshift drones. For another film, the drone battalions of Lyman and Kupiansk closed the sky in place of their overly timid allies. This winter, in Pokrovsk and Sumy, high-tech command rooms where battles were fought at a distance. I even heard—at the time without fully understanding—Mr. Zelensky announcing that his engineers were developing a new generation of drones capable of striking Russia up to the Arctic.
Today, all the cards are turned. Mr. Putin terrorized the world with his nuclear blackmail. There was an army capable of calling his bluff—and it did.
“Just say thank you,” Vice President JD Vance lectured President Zelensky during their February altercation in the Oval Office. All of us should thank Ukraine, a small nation that has grounded a third of the bombers that promised apocalypse to Warsaw, Berlin or Paris.
This weekend’s drone operation is a further step on the path to victory. I don’t know what form that victory will take, or whether it will be the front, the rear or its regime that will give in first in Russia. But the balance of power is increasingly clear.
On one side, a ridiculed general staff, an ultimate weapon that is greatly diminished and discredited, troops so demoralized that they fight only with the support of North Korean, Chinese, Ghanaian, Bangladeshi and Iranian mercenaries.
On the other side, a patriotic citizen army, motivated and knowing why it combats—an army that has proved its mastery of the most advanced military technologies, its excellence not only in trench warfare but also in the new remote and ghost warfare.
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