When a drone popped out of the back of a broken-down truck on the side of a Siberian highway on Sunday, bystanders didn't know what to make of it. "Holy smokes! Technology's come so far! Why are we even driving anymore? Better off piloting that drone," the narrator of a viral video said. "The cops are after it, would you look at that! Some idiot's spraying bullets everywhere!"
The Russian police, it turns out, were right to shoot at the drone. It was headed straight toward the airbase near Irkutsk. Across the country, swarms of small explosive drones descended onto military bases and destroyed a large part of Russia's nuclear bomber fleet. The flying bombs were smuggled into Russia by Ukrainian intelligence services in a plot known as Operation Spiderweb.
The Ukrainian drone attack was an audacious, desperate, and dangerous gamble on the eve of this week's peace talks between Russia and Ukraine. ("Trump said we don't have the cards—this shows we do have the cards, and we can play them," Oleg Ustenko, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, told Politico.) It was also a demonstration of a trend unfolding worldwide: Drones now allow weaker forces to go toe-to-toe with even nuclear superpowers.
