Asymmetric Warfare was Always in the Cards

It seems like years, but it’s only a few months since the February 28 mugging of Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, surely a low point in Western history, though we’ve seen lower since.

The sneak attack by Trump and Vance has, of course, disappeared down the memory hole already. Nobody wants to remember their historic betrayal, not just of Ukraine, but of American values writ large. Nobody wants to remember how they ambushed Zelensky right out in public, on live television, so we could all be ashamed of our country at once.

The video isn’t really worth a second look. Honestly, I never looked the first time — it was the kind of thing I’d rather read about than see, and what I’d read was bad enough.

But in light of new information, I went back and watched it anyway. A horrifyingly juvenile display of playground bullying by purportedly grown men, my overall take was mortification that I live in a country that could give these two swine the keys to the men’s room, let alone the kingdom.

But never mind. I was there to watch Zelensky. I wanted to see if he was showing any cards.

“Cards,” of course, was the operative metaphor for the meeting. Trump famously, and obsessively, told Zelensky that “You don’t have any cards.” Which was his caring and sensitive way of saying your shithole country is doomed, and what you really need to do, here and now, is grovel.

But Zelensky was — to extend the metaphor — all poker face. A highly trained actor, he’s totally comfortable in front of a camera. He knows exactly how he’s coming across, and he knows how to handle hecklers.

Mostly, he held back and absorbed the blows. When forced to react — to say something in response to the absurdly vicious assaults — he pushed back politely, even as they yelled over him. His English, which is good but not great, restricted his verbal fluency, but his body language spoke volumes about awareness and self-control. If he had any cards, he wasn’t showing them.

It was an impossible situation. His country was hanging on by its fingernails. His richest and most important benefactor had been taken over by thugs and thieves. Still, he held his own.

Now, with twenty-twenty hindsight, we can look back at that meeting, knowing that Zelensky was, indeed, holding cards, and some good ones at that. On June 1, he turned a few face-up.

Stop me if you’ve heard this, but Ukraine just pulled off one of the more audacious military feats in the history of warfare.

For two years, Ukrainians had sat by helplessly as their cities were repeatedly pummelled by cruise missiles launched from Russian bombers. For two years, death rained from the sky, indiscriminately targeting innocent civilians and critical infrastructure. Then, last week, Ukraine threw a counter punch, and it landed.

They blew up billion-dollar bombers with thousand-dollar drones. And asymmetric warfare was ready for its closeup.

By now the story has made the rounds, so I won’t get into the play-by-play. But briefly, the operation was in the works for a year and a half, and the plan was definitely not shared with anyone from the Trump administration. This fact alone shows how far we’ve sunk as a nation, in just a few months.

The whole operation went, quite literally, under the radar. Russian air defenses did not detect the smuggling of dozens of small drones into the country over the course of a year, drones that were then driven in hijacked trucks, in specially-modified containers, to warehouses within easy reach of the five major bomber bases that were wreaking so much destruction on Ukraine.

The containers presumably sat in place, waiting for the go-ahead to arrive over Russia’s own telecommunications channels. At the designated signal, the containers were programmed to open from the top and release the drones.

Those drones skipped right past the local defenses, which could never have imagined, let alone prepared for, such an attack. Trained, by AI, to recognize any Tupelev-class bombers they might come across, the drones had plenty of targets to aim for, all of them on the ground. Most of the planes they hit were damaged beyond repair.

This couldn’t be more asymmetric. These were off-the-shelf drones, modified to carry the payloads needed to take out the bombers. The people involved — the smugglers, truck drivers, warehouse workers, and scores of free agents, both witting and unwitting — were all evacuated before the actual event. The investment in money and manpower will be shown, at some point, to have been shockingly little. With no known casualties.

And the return on that investment is massive. The final tallies vary considerably — and there’s a lot of disinformation on all sides of the story — but it appears that Russia lost roughly a third of its strategic bomber fleet in a little over an hour.

This is a big deal. In my limited understanding, that bomber fleet was already well past its sell-by date, with little chance of replacement. The Tupelev-series aircraft were designed and built for another era, to solve problems from the last century. They are no longer in production, and would need to be replaced from scratch.

The fleet was also stretched dangerously thin, since it remains responsible, not just for launching cruise missiles at Ukraine, but also for taking a central role in Russia’s nuclear defense. Many of those bombers were configured to carry strategic nukes that can be launched at a moment’s notice — Armageddon on demand. Both the cruise missiles and the nukes are mission-critical to Putin, and the loss of a third of his bomber fleet has surely gotten his attention.

It's worth restating just how weak Russia actually is. Underneath Putin’s bloodthirsty bluster is a system that simply doesn’t work. He has driven out his country’s entire creative class. He has stifled all initiative, all critical thinking, all intellectual ferment, and replaced it with fear. His industrial base is spectacularly corrupt and inefficient, to the point of mass dysfunction.

This is not a country that can put together a new bomber class any time soon. Maybe China will sell them bombers — hell, maybe Trump will — but the price would be steep and the terms humiliating. Putin continues to play from weakness.

In the meantime, Zelensky’s hand is stronger than previously thought. He has demonstrated that the grit, ingenuity, and, yes, desperation of the Ukrainian people is a force Putin can’t handle, and Trump can’t bully.

Much has been made of the fact that neither civilians nor civilian facilities were targeted in the drone strike — an important point, given Putin’s appetite for mass death — but to the Russian people the message was nonetheless clear: Today it was your bombers, tomorrow it could be your power plant, your water supply, or your mass transit system.

The Russian propaganda machine will try hard to downplay the raid’s effects, but there is little doubt that paranoia will seep through the media bubble and out into the populace.

Will it change the course of the war? Probably not. Putin’s insistence on a permanent war on Ukraine doesn’t get any smarter with time, just more murderous. It’s clear he has no endgame, and that the current stasis will last at least as long as he’s alive. Barring something seriously asymmetric.

Meanwhile, Ukraine-watchers are assuming Zelensky has plenty more cards in his asymmetric deck, and that he’ll be picking his moments to play them. As for Putin, I’m guessing he sees drones in his sleep.