Donald Trump believes that the Ukrainian strike on Russian airfields gave Putin a pretext to bomb Ukraine. This is a bold assumption, if only because massive combined air-strikes by Russia against residential districts of Ukrainian cities were taking place long before that Ukrainian action. Moreover, such attacks are not prepared in a matter of days but over the course of months—because to carry out a large-scale strike one must know exactly how many missiles and drones will have been produced by the time the operation is planned.
This does not mean I rule out Putin’s desire to respond to the Ukrainian blow, but it will not happen today. What really has happened today is a genuine change in the rules of the game in this war—and not only for Russia itself.
The most militarily advanced states have so far relied on multi-billion-dollar investments in their defense. The United States’ defense budget reaches one trillion dollars, and soon Donald Trump will, at another NATO summit, demand that his partners increase their military budgets.
Yet a fair question arises: what is the point of all this expensive and unwieldy military hardware if it can be destroyed by a batch of inexpensive drones? By the way, Elon Musk himself—whose technological abilities and grasp of trends are hard to deny—grasped the main point of the Ukrainian operation. He said that the era of airplanes is ending and the era of drones is beginning.
Thus one can say that the daring Ukrainian special operation, even if it did not deal a decisive blow to the arsenal of the Aerospace Forces of the Russian Federation, has definitely changed the very rules of the game in major wars.
And now, as I write these lines, reports are emerging of a new operation during which, supposedly using drones, the arsenal of Russian military equipment was practically destroyed.
Now drones may have put an end not only to the existence of aircraft but of tanks as well. This is how the logic of military-technical progress works in wartime.
A state whose arsenals cannot match those of its adversary looks for new and unconventional solutions to create parity in the war.
Donald Trump may have thought that cutting military aid to Ukraine would force Kyiv to make concessions to Russia’s aggressive demands, but he achieved only a change in the very paradigm of Ukrainian military thinking—they began seeking non-standard ways to shrink Russian arsenals.
So it has been and so it will always be. One need only recall the Second World War.
Had it not been so deadly, had it not involved the mass extermination of civilians, the Holocaust—would the world’s leading physicists have united to create the atomic bomb and forever alter the very history of humanity and the conditions of its existence (or non-existence)?
That is why every war is so dangerous: it accelerates the progress of death. And that is why, back in 2022, I so insistently warned against this progress and called on the civilized world to do everything possible to force Russia to stop. Not to convince themselves that this is “just a Ukrainian war.” Not to imagine the war will bypass someone. Not to think that a vast ocean will protect anyone.
At a recent meeting in the White House, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky reminded us of this. He rightly told United States President Donald Trump that Americans do not feel this war the way Ukrainians do—but they can feel it.
That remark provoked an aggressive reaction from both the American President and his Vice President, J. D. Vance—precisely because they believed Zelensky was speaking in utterly unrealistic terms and that nothing and no one threatens the United States.
After September 11, though, I would not be so certain.
And now we understand: from a similar drone attack—which any hostile state or even a terrorist organization can now prepare—no ocean will protect us. And no trillion-dollar military budgets will save us.
This is the lesson the world has learned from the Russian-Ukrainian war. Pandora’s box has already been opened. Putin is now caught in the web—but that does not mean that others will not be ensnared as well.
And the sooner this war ends, the greater the chance that this deadly progress can be halted—that its swift and relentless development will not create new problems for the inhabitants of those countries that today believe they are enjoying peace.
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