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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   5385 thread views

Transnational Thursday for May 29, 2025

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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In the last few hours there has been a massive drone attack on Russia’s strategic bomber fleet. Apparently drone swarms were smuggled into Russia in cargo trucks and released a short distance from the airfields. Some of the bases attacks are more than 4,500 kilometers away from the Ukrainian border. The Ukrainian MOD claims that 34 percent of Russias’s strategic air force has been destroyed. This is an unconfirmed number, but there are multiple videos of groups of 4-7 TU-95 bombers burning on their airfields.

What a great advertisement for better border control. At this point, you basically have to be doing some kind of search on every single container coming in, right? But then, how do you find trustworthy un-bribe-able people at scale to inspect them all? As the story goes, if you don't think terrorists could get a nuclear bomb into the country, figure they could always hide it in a shipment of drugs.

Word on the street (who knows if true) is that the drone containers were assembled inside Russia by Ukrainian sleeper agents. There's a photo circulating claiming to depict the interior of the same warehouse in Chelyabinsk (I think) that was in the Ukrainian propaganda release depicting the assembly process.

At this point, you basically have to be doing some kind of search on every single container coming in, right?

Or alternatively just store your combat aircraft in reinforced hangars, as they all should be in the first place.

You can not reinforce all soft targets. You can reinforce a few military installations, but if your enemy is OK with terrorizing civilians, this is a perfect weapon of terror. Blowing up a truck can destroy a building, maybe a block if it's really big. But releasing a truckload of explosive drones can paralyze a whole multi-million city.

... Huh?

How does that solve the problem of drones hurled at Dodgers games or Morgan Wallen concerts? Or power substations or the George Washington bridge at rush hour? Or, hell, just in the general direction of downtown Dallas?

It doesn't solve any of that, of course.

I've heard the claim that US and Russian strategic bombers are currently required to be stored in a way accessible to satellite recon, as part of the verification sections of our arms control treaties.

Skimming through summaries of New START (and the long-expired START I, in case this was an outdated claim), though, I can't seem to find any such requirements, so it's possible this was just a misunderstanding or a fabrication. I do see requirements for allowing frequent on-site inspections, though, which you'd hope would be sufficient alone. If I missed something about bomber storage and there is some need to change the verification requirements, now would be a great time to do it - the latest extension of New START expires next February.

Edit: ... and apparently nobody cares when New START expires, because Putin suspended Russia's participation in it in 2023.

I've heard the claim that US and Russian strategic bombers are currently required to be stored in a way accessible to satellite recon, as part of the verification sections of our arms control treaties.

Yes, they need to be made visible to satellites of the other party during and after the process of being eliminated in accordance with the treaty.

Well, that would certainly be easier to square with the need to protect the remaining non-eliminated bombers.

Thanks. Do you have a citation for that?

I've seen it mentioned by X channels that follow the war. But even if it's untrue, and why would it be, the Russian government having suspended participation in the treaty in 2023, which I wasn't aware of, renders the whole issue moot anyway. There's no good reason to leave heavy bombers out in the open.

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