Crimean bridge attack and Operation Spiderweb show Zelensky has a fist full of wild cards against Russia
Ukraine’s intelligence services released a video of their attack on Russia’s most important link to Crimea, the Kerch Bridge, which was recorded using Russia’s own surveillance systems.
The eruption of 1.1 tons of explosive on the logistical artery dealt a physical blow, but it’s the psychological effect that will be longer lasting.
Kyiv’s SBU spooks are telling Russia, and Vladimir Putin’s fan-in-chief Donald Trump, “see what we can do”.
Alongside Operation Spiderweb, a few days earlier, which Ukraine claims destroyed 34 per cent of Moscow’s strategic bomber force over thousands of miles inside the Russian Federation, the assassination of Russian military leaders, and the relentless targeting of Putin’s energy infrastructure, Ukraine is signalling that it has not only survived, but could win, this war.
Donald Trump loves a winner. His contempt for America’s own war dead, revealed when he reportedly described a Paris WW2 American cemetery as ‘filled with losers”, is well known.
So too is his very public smear of Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, whom he told in the Oval Office that he didn’t hold any good cards.
Kyiv has shown that far from holding a weak hand, Zelensky has a fist full of wild cards that reveal Ukraine’s capabilities are no joke.
Ukrainian officials have said they kept the Kerch operation and Spiderweb secret from even their closest allies. It’s conceivable, however, that at least one Nato member may have known of the bridge attack because of the close relationship between Ukrainian and Nato special forces.
But Operation Spiderweb came as much of a surprise to American intelligence services as it did to the Kremlin.
That is deliberate. Ukraine has concluded, along with members of the intelligence sharing network of Anglo-Saxon nations known as Five Eyes, that the US cannot be trusted with the most sensitive intelligence.
Canada, New Zealand, Australia and the UK all know that US spy agencies will protect their own assets. But none of them now believe that the White House is a safe repository for their most secret secrets because the US commander in chief is notoriously sloppy with confidential information – and so are his top members of staff.
The Kerch operation was likely to have been many months in preparation. Russia has moved quickly to try to reopen the link between Crimea, which it captured from Ukraine in 2014 and Russian territory. But driving heavy vehicles or trains across it is now a game of roulette.
And it marks a change in the nature of the Russian campaign against Ukraine.
And when a truck stopped close to the Belaya airfield, deep inside Siberia, the wooden sheds onboard opened their roofs to release a swarm of quadcopters over the weekend warfare changed forever.
