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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   1596 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.

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.

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Skimming through summaries of New START (and the long-expired START I, in case this was an outdated claim), though, I can't seem to find any such requirements, so it's possible this was just a misunderstanding or a fabrication.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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