Professor Michael C. Horowitz

Operation Spiderweb was an ingenious strike by Ukraine deep inside of Russia.

Ukraine smuggled in container trucks across Russia's border, deep inside the country, hundreds of small one-way attack drones.

And when they received a signal, they launched and targeted Russian strategic bombers, some of Russia's most important military assets, and did hundreds of millions of dollars of damage to Russian forces.

the attack was shocking because it was the first time that ukraine demonstrated the ability to take the drone capabilities that it had used to target russian force of front lines to hit russian forces deep inside of russia hundreds of miles away from the fight and ukraine had been using

The thing about Operation Spiderweb that was unique was really the intelligence.

It was Ukraine's ability to smuggle these shorter-range one-way attack drones across Russia's border.

What we're seeing now is something very different.

Ukraine in some ways has mimicked Russia's use of the Shahid-136, Iran's long-range one-way attack drone, and developed their own long-range one-way attack drone.

So Ukraine has now developed the ability to launch strikes that can go up to a couple thousand kilometers into Russia, giving them the ability to target critical Russian infrastructure around the country.

Absolutely.

And it's not just the specific damage that they cause.

It's shattering the sense of safety that the Russian people had.

Ukraine's people have lived in terror, essentially, since the beginning of the war when Putin launched his brutal invasion, whereas Russians behind the front lines felt relatively safe.

What Ukraine has demonstrated over the last six months in particular is the ability to strike throughout the first couple thousand kilometers into places like St.

Petersburg in ways that I think has really shattered that sense of security and changed the dynamic of the war.

I mean, one of the things that people forget is the way that precision guidance, the thing that lets you hit not just a city block, but a specific building or a specific part of a building, is now essentially a 50-year-old technology.

Mm-hmm.

This is something that we saw countries like the United States start to do in the 1970s and 1980s.

And you can now miniaturize that technology.

Think about the technology we have in our phones every day that tells us exactly where we are.