Exactly. This is a massive strike that we fully won’t know the repercussions of for a little bit. We’ll just have to see how their optempo changes. It honestly could be even worse for them. They have 120 of those bombers, period. Meaning some of them might not even be air worthy at all and are just spare parts.
Totally. This is fucking huge for the war.
Robin Williams.
That man was a staple of my childhood, and him passing felt like the final nail in the coffin to where my childhood ended.
You get it, brother.
This actually has huge implications for the war in general. Russias nuclear triad just had the dick blown off of it,
I’d be willing to wager that this was most, if not all the active bombers being used in the Ukrainian theatre. If they are following a loose rule of 3rds with their birds (deployed and flying missions, being prepped for deployment, shut down receiving repairs/overhauls), this very well could severely limit Russia’s ability to keep up their cruise missile bombardment.
If that’s the case, that frees up Ukraine to be much more flexible with their air defenses.
Not to mention if they were able to pull off a mission like this, allegedly using cell towers to fly their drones, what’s stopping them from doing similar limited missions to tank factories, recruit depots, and other places that are further away from the front? Literally all of these targets now become viable because they will be much less heavily guarded than the nuclear triad bombers.
Protecting those assets pulls material and meat from the front lines, which further helps Ukraine.
I can’t help but see this as a massive positive swing in momentum for Ukraine.
If a Republican crippled a historic enemies military without a single soldier dying and did so using a fraction of the US military budget they would put him on Mt. Rushmore, but since Biden did it they, and the entire media apparatus, called him a bumbling fool and senile.
Just like how Reagan gets credit for ‘ending the Cold War’ when a ton of the legwork for that was put in place by Kennedy, Eisenhower, (yes Nixon too), and LBJ and Carter.
Biden has flaws, and I wish Biden really did more to help Ukraine in the beginning of the war, but him helping out and clearing so much equipment to them was a genuinely good thing that he did while in office.
There’s drone footage already out there showing the planes burning.
They have roughly 120 strategic bombers in their air force. 40 of those is 33%.
Yeah! So they use the one drone to destroy something and the next drone is looking to see what damage was done. If the damage is consistent with what they want, that drone then will go onto it’s next target. If the attack wasn’t substantial damage, then the drone can augment that previous mission to achieve that desired result.
That’s honestly fucking awesome. It’s straight out of a Tom Clancy novel, but fucking real.
Apparently these drones didn’t use drone RFs they were using cell towers to fly.
30% less bombers means drone and missile attacks into Ukraine can be significantly decreased that’s one of the biggest developments since the start of the war.
We just saw today what that means.
Yeah, if you set a bomb off on a plane that is most likely fuel laden, you’re not going to be able to fly that plane again. If the air frame isn’t completely destroyed, it’s going to take months or years to repair, functionally rendering it destroyed.
Literally irreplaceable as Russia can’t build these planes anymore.
The dollar value is easily in the billions.
Russias border is fucking huge. These guys could have fake passports, so fly something like… idk, Moscow to Ankara, then from there back to Ukraine.
They could have boarded flights hours after doing this attack. That’s just an insane level of operational ballsiness.
I was seeing from other online spaces that this would be about 30% of Russias strategic bomber fleet and it’s accompanying aircraft like their AWACs that got hit.
If that’s the case that’s a staggeringly bad day for the Russian air force, which means it’s a good fucking day.
Seems like this particular base had zero security forces to watch their planes.
What’s interesting to me is it seems like they were using a ‘chain’ of drones. One goes in and another is watching as BDA, then that one goes on it’s mission, while the next is doing BDA, etc.
That’s pretty brilliant. I wonder how many operators they were using per base.
Israel needs to stop bombing children. Full stop.
I have Irish heritage. That’s literally why my family emigrated to the US
This. I personally think they hacked the election, and they also purged the voter rolls.
It’s even worse than that.
They have roughly 120 *total bombers. Meaning a chunk of these are not air worthy air frames, and are just kept on for parts.
This very well could have crippled 40+ percent of all of Russias strategic bombers.