The Art of War, Ukraine Edition
[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]
Marcy shared this observation yesterday via Bluesky about Ukraine’s attack on Russian air bases:
emptywheel @[email protected]
The Ukrainian attack used RU telecom networks rather than Starlink.
Hard to guess whether this will drive Putin or Elon nuts first.
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/06/02/europe/inside-ukraine-drone-attack-russian-air-bases-latam-intl
The brazenness of using Russia’s telecom networks is noteworthy, especially after concerns that Ukraine’s military operations could be compromised by Russian access to Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite communications.
The avoidance of Starlink for this mission named Operation Spiderweb (Ukrainian: Operatsija Pavutyna) suggests Ukraine accepted this possibility as reality and deliberately worked around the compromised network.
The success of the mission may also suggest this was a solid assumption and avoiding Starlink an effective decision.
There are two points in reporting about Operation Spiderweb which haven’t been analyzed further:
— The specificity of the plan’s inception;
— The role of Ukraine’s security service, the Sluzhba bezpeky Ukrainy (SBU).
CNN and other outlets reported the number of drones Ukraine used to attack Russian military aircraft (117) and the amount of time the operation took from inception to the attack (one year, six months and nine days). The candor is rather shocking; perhaps cognitive dissonance explains why there haven’t been many analysts picking apart these openly shared details.
But these details may have messages within them considering how in-your-face they are. The number 117 seems peculiar because it’s an odd number though it’s not prime. Were all the drones that were smuggled in deployed? Was this another reason why the Trojan Horse wooden sheds were booby trapped — to eliminate any drones that did not deploy properly? Or perhaps the number simply is what it is on the face of it.
The exactness of the operation’s inception, though, seems deliberate, as if launch date meant something. Depending on how the one year, six months, and nine days are counted, the spiderweb began on November 22, 2023 or on December 23, 2023.
November 22 marked the beginning of the Orange Revolution in 2004.
December 23 marked the holiday observed by Ukraine’s Armed Forces — Operational Servicemen Day.
Just as importantly, June 1 on which the attack occurred was the anniversary of the day Ukraine transferred the last of its nuclear warheads to Russia in 1996 under the terms of the Budapest Memorandum to which the US was a party. In other words, this message might not have been intended just for Russia.
The Budapest Memorandum may also explain the role of SBU to effect this operation. While one source in CNN’s reporting attributed the successful mission to “Ukraine’s special services,” most reports credited the operation to the SBU.
SBU is Ukraine’s counterintelligence organization with paramilitary features. It does not have the same reporting structure as Ukraine’s Armed Forces. It’s also responsible for the security of Ukraine’s president and reports directly to him. The flat structure may have ensured the level of secrecy necessary to carry out Operation Spiderweb.
The not-quite-military role of the SBU may also have been critical to lawfare. An operation conducted by SBU may be construed as a counterintelligence operation and not a military operation, fuzzing the ability of the target to respond under terms of its own doctrine or terms of treaties. If a trigger for Russia to launch an escalated military response is the use of conventional kinetic weapons on its soil by another country’s armed forces, Operation Spiderweb skirts this threshold having used non-traditional weapons deployed by a counterintelligence function.
By its subtle emphasis on the Budapest Memorandum, Ukraine made a point of Russia’s failure to comply with the memorandum’s terms after repeated threats of nuclear attacks against Ukraine and the west. Targeting long-range aircraft capable of carrying nuclear weapons, Ukraine punctuated the Memorandum’s terms including nuclear non-proliferation.
Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy has had a number of top military personnel swapped out during the course of the Russo-Ukraine war (ex. the commander of the Joint Forces of the Armed Forces in June 2024, the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces in February 2024, all regional military recruitment chiefs in August 2023), which might have suggested to outsiders cohesiveness could have been compromised by poor performance, disagreements with the conduct of the war, and plain old corruption. The personnel changes may have given the appearance Ukraine was not fully aligned toward repelling Russian aggression.
But as Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War, all warfare is based on deception.
The illusion these personnel changes created may have been relied upon as a head fake, allowing Vladimir Putin and the Russian military to feel excessively confident about the outcome of the war. That confidence was surely ruptured just as Russia and Ukraine entered a new round of negotiations to end the war this Monday in Istanbul. Russia opened by presenting a “memorandum” of terms but Ukraine has expressed its lack of faith in Russia’s compliance with co-signed memoranda.
Detonating explosives targeting the Kerch Strait bridge — a bridge one one likely use if driving from Turkey to Ukraine — added emphasis.
There is one more important facet to the timing of the operation’s inception. In February 2024, the Financial Times reported on leaked Russian military files:
When exactly were these documents leaked? To whom had they been leaked and how long was it before the Financial Times reported on them?
Is it possible the inception of Operation Spiderweb coincided with the leak of these documents which occurred after repeated attempts by Russia to blackmail Ukraine and the west using the threat of nuclear war?
Which brings up a third point not discussed in media coverage of Operation Spiderweb: by eliminating a sizeable portion of Russia’s capacity to deliver nuclear weapons, Ukraine has blunted Russia’s threat against the west and China.
This was worth all the military aid provided to Ukraine to date, and then some. Ukraine has more than earned a place in the European Community and NATO.
Wow Rayne, Danke sehr. Intelligence Agency level analysis.
Ditto. This post is what I have needed to read for weeks. Longer than that. What I knew about Ukraine’s drone attack from the MSM excited me. But this from Rayne thrills me in that 3D chess kind of way.
Thank you.
One of the reports about the Ukrainians hitting the Kerch Bridge yesterday (trying to take out one of the key piers underwater) mentioned that the cameras monitoring the bridge accesses were hacked, preventing detection of the drones. If true, I would not be surprised that Ukraine was able to access the Russian phone network.
I’m not so sure that Vlad would be the least bit concerned about the legal difference between the SBU and AFU arms of Ukrainian resistance. For Vlad, these are two sides of the same coin, and Ukraine’s announcements would reinforce that perception. It’s not like Vlad honors treaties anyhow.
The stakes are not the same for Ukraine as for Russia when it comes to compliance with treaties and international law. No rational person expects Putin to comply with any law anywhere given his deep history of transnational thuggery. Zelenskyy represents a country that aspires to become part of the European Community, connected in some way to the European Union, and an eventual member of NATO. European states under Putin’s influence like Hungary will use any excuse to block Ukraine’s aspirations. If Ukraine can execute an operation like this in self defense and of benefit to Europe while remaining just inside the bounds of law, why shouldn’t Ukraine do that.
That’s really not a question.
I’ll agree on the strategic goal but I would expect that the Putin cabal in the EU will reject Ukraine by any means necessary with any excuse necessary. I doubt that the non-Putin bloc is concerned with legal niceties. All Ukraine needs to keep doing is make it crystal clear who the war criminals are, the Russians under Putin.
“make it crystal clear who the war criminals are”
Which is why Spiderweb may have hewed close to the line — not conventional weapons, not Armed Forces, only military assets which had been used against Ukraine.
From the little that I’ve gathered, the Russians were preparing a large strike on Ukraine command control, transport hubs, energy infrastructure, etc. (largest such attack since 2022) involving aircraft launched cruise missiles dubbed Operation Zeus’ Lightning. This attack was to happen before the meeting on June 1st and was meant to send a message to Ukraine’s allies as well as put more pressure on them to accept the Russian terms. This was released by the Kremlin-funded and controlled outlet Tsargrad on May 31st (taken down after Operation Spiderweb forced them to abort Operation Zeus’ Lightning).
Slava Ukraine
“The number 117 seems peculiar because it’s an odd number though it’s not prime. ”
I don’t understand what’s peculiar, please elaborate.
Why didn’t Ukraine share their plans ahead of time on Signal? It’s perfectly safe. /s
So if you’ve seen the videos of the drones being deployed, you can see that they were in rows of 3. 117 drones means that there were 39 rows of 3 — which doesn’t give you a clean number of rows per container. (The one I saw I counted between 8 and 10 rows.)
For 4 sites, I could conjecture 3 containers with 10 rows and 1 with 9 (either a different size container or 1 row was damaged/didn’t deploy) but those would be assumptions on my part.
Yeah, that was my thinking — but I acknowledge the images I’ve seen may not have reflected the actual deployment sheds let alone the type(s) of drones used. I do think it’s realistic that there wasn’t a 100% deployment given the number of dependencies involved. But again, that may in part be why the sheds were booby trapped as a means of obscuring effectiveness.
The other variable may be the type and size of sheds used; they could have been configured to match the size of the target sites as not all the air bases had the same number and type of aircraft.
I understand one truck was stopped and the drones didn’t get deployed. (The cabins were rigged with self-destruct incendiaries.)
Numerology and lawfare aside, Operation Spiderweb will go down in the history of war and warfare as an event as significant as the invention of the machine gun, the Air Force, submarines and nuclear weapons.
I hope we get to read the whole, unfiltered, uncensored story someday.
That’s a wee bit hyperbolic considering the use of drones in warfare is not new, nor is the concept of Trojan horses.
True, Rayne, but has a land-based “Trojan horse” ever been used as an aircraft carrier that dispenses remotely-controlled mini-kamikaze machines before? It’s guerrilla and high-tech all rolled into one.
I gotta agree with Fiendish Thingy—this is a huge paradigm shift. Virtually any military or civilian target would be vulnerable, especially stationary ones.
Pretty fucking scary.
Be sure to give thanks to a tech bro (and to thank government funding for science) for this new warfare opportunity! {sarcasm}
Regardless of where you put it in terms of importance, this attack was a huge big deal in terms of military history. Meanwhile, the two stories I’ve read about our own military leadership following this incredibly-important story is not that they’re carefully and doing good work on how to handle/create such threats…
Instead they’re giving ships more macho names because DEI and refusing to commission the trans graduates at the airforce academy. Way to keep your eye on the ball guys. Heck of a job, Hegseth!
And with what appears, no US help.
Fox just reported this as “Ukraine with another offensive attack on Russia.” That’s funny, I thought Ukraine was defending itself.
Apparently, the intellectual ability of Fox Sports to differentiate between offense and defense has not successfully transferred to Fox News.
Well, Trump poached the “best” 23 from Fox so imagine who’s left. And Murdoch didn’t even object to letting them go. Ouch.
As I previously wrote, why would these “best” move to a position that probably pays them 1/x amount of what they made on the network?
Ukraine notably did not employ the Statue of Liberty play.
Noted – but I would say just give them some time!
Coincidentally, I just finished reading a book titled Nuclear War by Annie Jacobsen. It is terrifyng. I highly recommend it to everyone. I would say, from that book, Ukraine hasn’t blunted any Russian nuclear threat against China or the west, especially if Russia is war-gaming with naval officers and their submarine fleet per the Financial Times report above.
Blunted doesn’t mean neutered. There’s also no getting around the repeated failures Russia experienced when testing its nuclear capabilities, ex. the 2019 explosion at Nyonoksa rocket test site and the four RS-28 Sarmat test failures. With that kind of history and a steady grind of military assets, would Russia risk another potentially massive failure at sea versus continuing its war of attrition?
You are rational. I do not think Putin is a rational person and therefore sees risk much differently than do you or I.
Our principal adversaries were the Warsaw Pact forces when I served, and they possessed a significant advantage in the conventional side. However, we knew our weapons were better and generally better maintained (this is a significant point). Part of our advantage lay in the fact that the Warsaw Pact forces needed to maintain political control via commissars and generally had nothing between officers and conscripts. That lack of institutional trust makes for bad results in the field.
I had mentioned in an earlier thread that the loss of the strategic forces will give Xi and KJU a reason to see how degraded Russia’s defenses are. Apparently, Putin’s Russia can no longer build their bombers, perhaps due to the lack of materials since the design bureaus (MiG, Tupolev, Sukhoi, etc.) are still functioning. The border areas are filled with ethnic groups more likely to be selected for conscription because Putin wanted to limit the bad press in Moscow and St Petersburg. There will be resentment because of that policy IMHO.
I think you’re correct that the real threat in any hypothetical war situation is missiles that are submarine based. But missiles and bombers that have stand-off capability are also part of the equation, and destroying the bombers changes the calculus, in other words, blunts the overall threat to some degree.
As well, the bombers destroyed were part of an ageing fleet. What are the odds that the subs are also an ageing resource? One would be a fool to bet on that, but as was demonstrated in 2022, a lot of the equipment used in the invasion wasn’t properly maintained, and failed pretty quickly. Since then, the Russians have been burning through their Soviet-inherited reserves of equipment at an increasing rate, and they’re not able to build new stuff fast enough to make up their losses. At least one commentator, Perun, thinks that they will be out of much equipment and have no replacements by the end of 2026.
Russian Nuclear Ballistic Missile submarines are either Soviet-era long-in-the-tooth boats that are exceedingly noisy (and thus needed to hide in protected ‘bastions’ patrolled by quieter attack boats to keep NATO subs and sub-hunters catching them) or are of the new Borei-class which is, from everything I hear, pretty much untested in actual wartime conditions (i.e. they’re not taking part in realistic training or exercises). Our anti-submarine warfare ships are pretty sharp in tracking Russian nuke boats without them knowing we’re there. The diesel-electric boats like the Kilo are harder to hunt that way, but are still far inferior to anything NATO fields.
Looking at the state of the Russian Navy, and how it’s being hollowed-out to send sailors to the front lines in Ukraine, I expect the much-needed maintenance and logistic operations to support those attack subs and the missile boats they supposed to protect are being short changed.
Yes, the SSBN is the #1 Russian nuclear weapon threat, but for the most part NATO seems to be doing a good job tracking them and keeping them from positioning themselves anywhere that’s a good first-strike location.
Sean
I can only suggest to each person responding to my post above that s/he read Jacobsen’s book Nuclear War. I believe each person would change her/his opinion above after that reading.
I gotta figure a variation on this drone play could be used against submarines, esp. harbored subs. Warships and aircraft carriers, too.
Both the U.S. and Russia operate highly capable submarine fleets, with the U.S. traditionally excelling in stealth and integration, while Russia prioritizes deep-diving and heavy weaponry. Additionally, the U.S. generally prioritizes crew survivability with robust safety programs like SUBSAFE, whereas Russian design historically emphasized combat survivability through features like double hulls and compartmentalization, sometimes at the expense of crew habitability and rescue provisions, making their design and production philosophies distinct.
I’m trying to downsize my library after retirement, so I read through the summary on Wikipedia. From that it seems clear that the author has ginned up a situation where (1) everything that can go wrong does go wrong and (2) has the US launching land-based missiles at North Korea when a sub-based response would be the quicker option (and much more likely to succeed). So yeah, it looks like a scary book, but it’s a scenario like any other. According to the summary she also pushes the rapidity of the responses. What’s to say that a US response might actually be paused somewhat so as to guarantee higher success?
Also, maybe you could post the precise reason why Jacobsen has North Korea starting an unwinnable (from their perspective) war in the first place. What’s in it for them?
In the case of why the DPRK would start something, it’s desperation. The only reason IMHO that the DPRK exists politically is so Xi can have someone to blame and provoke like an obnoxious little brother. If one reads demographic data for example, the ROK population is getting bigger (something like 2 inches taller per capita) and the ROK is quite a bit richer.
It would have to be a sneak attack and the PRC would have to be part of it because the ROK armed forces are much more capable and more motivated now than in 1950. I can’t see how the DPRK can beat them alone, even before accounting for the 8th US Army remnants along the DMV.
As it is, I am a little surprised KJU sent soldiers to Ukraine in the numbers that have been reported. If nothing else, it may be instructive for the KPA to see just how inept the Russian forces are between tactics and equipment. Xi would be interested as well.
This is a bit OT, but for decades DPRK has been positioning artillery and rocket assets close to the border. From the 38th parallel they can shell Seoul. If the DPRK ever re-started the war – no peace has ever been signed, so technically a state of war still exists – first day civilian casualties would be horrendous because Seoul proper contains something like 20% of the population of ROSK.
Several tunnels have also been detected and shut down, which would’ve allowed DPRK to position infantry assets beyond the border without costly battles. It’s not known how many undiscovered tunnels exist, though I doubt there are any or many right now.
DPRK has been sending ammo to Russia, so their artillery assets at the border will be degraded somewhat, and since a lot of shells have been in storage, it’s not known how many will work properly. Same for tubes.
I have to say, desperation doesn’t work for me as a motive. The DPRK nuclear arsenal has for long been a kind of blackmail of ROSK, a lever to try and force political changes. With the passing of the 1980s generation of activists, this will likely not work so well going forward. Kim Jong-Un’s state is a slave state, wherein the elite enjoys its grotesque perks while the peasants starve and live shorter lives than those in the South, so I find it hard to see why Kim would rock his own well-upholstered boat by starting a war. He’s raking in billions in crypto-thefts, a lot of which is spent on weapons, but a lot of which is also spent on conspicuous consumption. I think sending troops here and there is simply an extension of previous DPRK programs where they send people abroad to make hard currency for the regime.
Apologies for the length of this.
A key reason for KJU to provide as much as he could to Putin is the DPRK’s chronic shortage of foreign currency with which to purchase the things that keep his coterie happy. Selling shells that were aging out on the shelf was an easy transaction. Selling the lives of his minions to a man desperate for bodies in uniform was also not a difficult transaction from KJU’s position. Whether the DPRK gains any military benefit from the experience is almost beside the point.
Could have been anybody as the antagonist. It’s simply used to put a chain of events in motion (based on the prevailing institutionalized policies of mutually assured destruction) that cannot be stopped or reversed.
I suggested the book because it is highly detailed about how the air, land and sea systems all work and the vast difficulty in preventing any of them from serving their function. Given that it also demonstrates how any nuclear threat of Russia probably cannot be blunted. That would help answer the responses to my original post.
To answer your question, if you were the President and a nuke were assured of hitting Washington DC in thirty minutes would you delay a response? In the book it’s called a decapitation event for exactly that reason. Non-delay is the intended internalized and institutionalized reaction of a policy of mutually assured destruction. That’s precisely why they go through the drills to condition immediate response.
If you have a local public library, it might have access to the book.
Btw, I have a biography of John Paul Jones. Interesting person as I imagine you are.
“This was worth all the military aid provided to Ukraine to date, and then some. Ukraine has more than earned a place in the European Community and NATO.”
Yes! Thanks for this excellent post, Rayne!
Thanks for the analysis.
I’m wondering, given the pause since the attack, if Russia is worried that their lack of AWACs impedes their ability to reply in kind – the RT crowd are clamoring for a civilian heavy response – AND protect Moscow from Ukrainian missiles now free to fly deep into Russia.
We will see.
Russia mostly goes for civilian targets.
I read that some ‘AWACS’ type aircraft were destroyed in the attack, but not how many. My impression was that it was 1 or 2. This seems to me to be painful, but not debilitating. They probably only need 1 or 2 in the air at any moment. Like the rest of the strike, it is a big “ouch”, with little confidence that it won’t happen again next week.
The reports I have seen was that only 1 of that type of aircraft was destroyed in this attack, but that Russia only *had* 2 prior to the attack, and that many believe that the other is not in condition to fly.
Ukraine’s claims to have taken out ~1/3 of the fleet of certain types of aircraft actually understates the damage, since a lot of those aircraft had been mothballed/parted out, so if the number of destroyed planes is accurate it is closer half of their operational aircraft.
SBU has released some drone footage of strikes on aircraft. [Via quaoar’s daily report at dKos]
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:v7762wvbhnna4t4gptkbjogc/post/3lqrx2ym7m22d
Last night I was wondering how they did their data connection. Using Russian cell networks is kind of breathtaking, but I can totally see it working. Particularly as the video seemed to show the drones sequencing themselves out, not all flying at once. (Which might require too much bandwidth.)
I had read online (don’t recall where) that Russia had gathered its bombers in just a few locations, in preparation for a massive missile attack. They were previously dispersed. It was the opportunity presented by this gathering which provoked Ukraine to act when it did. It makes sense, but I don’t know if it is true.
That was Operation Zeus’ Lightning, to be launched hours before the meeting for the peace talks. Many of the aircraft that were hit were fueled up and possibly loaded with ordinance when the Ukrainians launched their preemptive attack.
This is a really fascinating breakdown.
For the Kerch strike, what is the significance with Turkey?
The peace negotiations are being held in Istanbul, beginning the day after Operation Spiderweb’s strike.
Ahh ok.
I was confused. Looking at a map, Instanbul is in West Turkey. I didn’t realize they would actually drive around and go through the Kerch bridge.
You’re thinking literally versus symbolically; the bridge was hit as if to say, Don’t think of coming back this way. The dates of inception and execution are also symbolic.
For two days the NYT has put the number of aircraft destroyed at 12. Everything else I’ve seen says 41 aircraft destroyed.
Not a bad days work!
Slava Ukraini!
41 were struck, 12 were completely destroyed. The future status of the damaged aircraft is unknown since they haven’t been built for awhile (in some cases 30+ years).
Yeah, good luck finding spare parts and skilled technicians who can repair those complex, Soviet-era aircraft. Russia has a hard time keeping much lower tech tanks in service.
especially when they’re being drafted and sent to the front.
Looks like Ukrainians aren’t resting on their laurels. Aside from using Russia’s own infrastructure against it, and making a bid to shake-and-stir the Kerchwasser, they’ve decided to have a big sip of Tupolev’s honey, straight from the servers. Mmmm-mmm, Good.
Courtesy of the Register.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/04/ukraine_hack_attack_russia/
“…You can’t stop us on the road to freedom
You can’t stop us ’cause our eyes can see
Men with insight, men in granite
Knights in armor intent on chivalry…”
Tupelo Honey, lyrics –h/t Van Morrison
putin spox trump has just spoken
https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/04/politics/trump-putin-phone-call-ukraine-response
Interesting that even monsters face existential threats. Naively assume that putin has charged his apprentice with the destruction of the US economy and the Western world order.
Also wicked interesting was Ukraine intel’s use of AI to pattern recognize the valuable aircrafts. Hey don’t hit something that’s already burning and look for those old big ones with 4 props.
Now AI is pretty clearly extremely very dangerous and one could take the darkside view
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTROMPq1SAA
or go with the lighter side
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qBlPa-9v_M
One other significance about the June 1 date I didn’t see mentioned here is that apparently it was Russia’s Military Transport Aviation Day, per Center for Strategic & International Studies:
https://www.csis.org/analysis/how-ukraines-spider-web-operation-redefines-asymmetric-warfare
I keep wondering, did they shoot their whole wad or do they have more drones in reserve?
Or, given the detail of information provided, as if to say we don’t care if you know how we did this…something else unexpected in the pipeline!
Same, though I have to believe the same folks who pulled this off also had other fallback operations in the event Spiderweb didn’t go off as planned, as well as additional operations in the pipeline.
They’ve now pulled off a trifecta between blowing up aircraft, bombing the Kerch Strait bridge, and hacking a Russian telecom network — rightly could call this series шок і благоговіння, shock and awe.
That’s not all of it. I saw this in a post on the dead bird app.
“Ukrainian military intelligence cyber specialists have carried out a successful cyberattack on Russia’s Tupolev Design Bureau — a key player in the production of strategic bombers.
They gained long-term access to internal systems, extracted 4.4 GB of sensitive data, hacked the official website to display an owl clutching a Russian aircraft, and obtained detailed info on personnel involved in bomber maintenance.”
The pic of the owl and Russian aircraft includes a spiderweb.
Just an FYI for new commenters (and established ones who should know better):
I am not going to clear comments for publication that look like demoralizatsiya or dezinformatsiya.
You can post that crap on Xitter.
Yes. This:
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/russia-faces-struggle-replace-bombers-lost-ukrainian-drone-strikes-2025-06-06/
I wish some journalist(s) would create a graphic depicting with circles the effective reach from each airbase where the drone-damaged “nuclear-capable bomber planes” were located so that it would be clear what countries benefitted from Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb besides Ukraine.
One knock-on effect of this Ukrainian drone strike deployed by trucks seems to be a massive logjam of trucks all over Russia that are now being searched before proceeding to their destinations. That’s gonna affect distribution of goods all over the country and ding the economy too.
I’m sure that there are other ancillary effects which will be negative for Russia as well. The Ukrainians are getting smarter and wiser but then Putin made a stupid strategic mistake from the very beginning by proclaiming Ukraine wasn’t really a country and that Ukrainians weren’t really human. You never tell your opponent that it’s a fight to the death because it makes the stakes much too clear. Always give an opponent an apparent, and it can be only apparent, way out. That’s straight out of Sun Tzu too.
Fiona succinctly describes the present UK situation in between the rock and the hard place
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jun/06/russia-is-at-war-with-uk-and-us-no-longer-reliable-ally
and Estemirova’s kid tells why Ukraine has little choice but to fight under the present circumstances
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/06/she-lived-without-fear-daughter-of-chechen-journalist-publishes-book-she-vowed-to-pen-after-murder-natalia-estemirova