Analysis of the Ukraine conflict.
Convened: 29 March 2026
Question: When did Ukraine begin striking deep inside Russia, including Moscow? Why was this not done earlier, and what role did US restrictions play? What is the strategic significance of the current pace of the campaign?
Format: Four sessions with documentary timeline
Sir Lawrence Freedman — Emeritus Professor of War Studies, King’s College London; author of Strategy: A History (2013) and Ukraine and the Art of Strategy (2019). The narrative strategist who has watched this war with the closest analytical attention.
A brief factual record before the colloquium opens.
January 2024: Ukraine launches a systematic long-range drone offensive against Russian territory using domestically produced platforms — specifically to circumvent US restrictions on Western-supplied weapons. Initial targets are oil refineries and energy infrastructure in border regions.
September 1, 2024: Ukraine strikes Moscow’s Kapotnya oil refinery and a power station in Tver with 158 drones — at that point one of the largest attacks on Russian territory. Russia’s own air defences acknowledge the scale.
September 18, 2024: Ukrainian drones destroy a massive Russian ammunition depot at Toropets, Tver region — the explosion is large enough to be detected by earthquake monitoring stations. Over 100 Ukrainian drones in a single operation.
November 2024: President Biden authorises Ukraine to use ATACMS — the Army Tactical Missile System — to strike targets inside Russian territory, reversing a longstanding restriction. The initial authorisation is linked to the deployment of approximately 10,000 North Korean troops to the Kursk region.
November 19, 2024: Ukraine uses ATACMS against a Russian military facility in Bryansk Oblast — the first use of US-supplied long-range missiles inside Russia.
March 11, 2025: Ukraine launches 337 drones at Russia in a single night, with 91 directed at the Moscow region — at that point the largest single attack on the Russian capital. The attack is timed precisely to coincide with US-Ukraine talks in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Moscow Mayor Sobyanin calls it the largest drone attack the capital has ever sustained. The Moscow Oil Refinery — which supplies up to half the city’s gas and diesel — is among the targets.
June 1, 2025 — Operation Spiderweb: Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) conducts the most audacious operation of the entire war. FPV drones are smuggled inside Russia hidden in trucks disguised as deliveries of wooden cabins. Drivers are paid to park in designated locations near the airbases without being told why. On a pre-planned signal, the roofs retract and the drones launch. Five airbases are struck across five time zones — including Belaya in Irkutsk, Eastern Siberia, 4,300 kilometres from Ukraine’s border, and Olenya near Murmansk in the Arctic Circle, over 1,800 kilometres away. More than 41 aircraft are hit, including Tu-95 and Tu-22M3 strategic bombers — the platforms Russia uses to launch cruise missiles at Ukrainian cities. The SBU claims $7 billion in damage and asserts that approximately 34% of Russia’s cruise missile carriers at key airbases have been put out of action. Zelenskyy calls it “absolutely brilliant” and notes it took eighteen months to plan. Ukraine does not notify the Trump administration in advance.
March 2026: Ukraine’s long-range drone sortie rate against Russia has effectively doubled from late 2025, with 100–200 drones crossing into Russian territory on many nights. For the first time in the war, Ukraine is launching comparable or greater numbers of long-range drones at Russia than Russia is launching at Ukraine. Ukraine has simultaneously been hunting Russian air defence systems — primarily Pantsir SA-22 units — destroying approximately half of Russia’s operational Pantsir stockpile according to SBU claims. Russia responds with its largest drone attack of the entire war on March 23–24, 2026: nearly 1,000 drones in 24 hours including a rare daytime wave, as part of its spring offensive.
MODERATOR: Let us begin with the restriction itself. From February 2022 through most of 2024, Ukraine was effectively prohibited by the United States from using Western-supplied weapons to strike targets inside Russia. This was not absolute — Ukraine used its own domestically produced drones — but it was the operative constraint on the campaign’s scope. Professor Schelling, this is fundamentally your territory.
THOMAS SCHELLING: Yes. The restriction was an escalation management decision, and it was theoretically coherent even if, in retrospect, it may have been strategically wrong.
Let me explain the logic. When the United States began supplying weapons to Ukraine, it faced a classic bargaining problem with Russia. The question was not only what Ukraine could achieve on the battlefield. The question was what signal would be sent to Moscow — what message each weapon delivery communicated about American intentions and the ultimate scope of American involvement. Every decision about what weapons to supply, with what restrictions on their use, was simultaneously a military decision and a diplomatic communication.
The restriction on striking inside Russia was the Americans saying to Putin: we are committed to Ukraine’s survival, but we are not committed to your defeat or humiliation. We are not trying to destroy Russia. There is a limit here. That limit was the Russian border. The Americans believed — and they may have been right in 2022 — that if they removed this limit, they removed the most important focal point in the conflict: the bright line between “war inside Ukraine” and “war inside Russia.” Once you cross that line with American-supplied weapons, you have materially changed what Russia is fighting. They are no longer fighting to control Ukraine. They are fighting to protect Russia from American attack. That changes the stakes enormously, and the Americans feared what it might do to Putin’s nuclear calculus.
This is what I would call the problem of the salience: certain limits are self-enforcing because both parties tacitly recognise them as limits. The Russian border was that kind of limit. Not because it was legally or morally privileged, but because it was visible, clear, and both sides understood it as the line. Remove it, and you have no obvious substitute.
SIR LAWRENCE FREEDMAN: Schelling has the theory exactly right and I want to add the political texture, because the restriction was not simply a cool strategic calculation. It was also a response to domestic American politics and to European allied anxieties — particularly German and French concerns about escalation — that produced a reflexive caution which sometimes went well beyond what was strategically justified.
The pattern was consistent from 2022 onwards. Every significant Ukrainian request for a new weapons category — HIMARS, tanks, F-16s, ATACMS — was resisted by Washington for months, then reluctantly conceded when the military situation made it impossible to justify further delay, and then the weapon was provided with restrictions on its use that were gradually relaxed as the world failed to end. This is what I mean when I say strategy is improvisation rather than design. The Biden administration did not have a coherent theory of where it was going with Ukraine. It had a terror of escalation that was sometimes well-founded and sometimes neurotic, and it made decisions reactively rather than proactively.
The ATACMS restriction is the clearest example. By the time Biden lifted it in November 2024, Ukraine had already been running a substantial long-range drone campaign inside Russia for most of the year using its own platforms. The horses were largely out of the barn. The restriction had prevented Ukraine from using the most precise, long-range instruments available to it, but it had not prevented Ukraine from striking inside Russia. It had simply forced Ukraine to use the tools it developed itself — which, as Borets will tell us, produced a different and arguably more interesting kind of capability.
BORETS: I want to say something that may be uncomfortable but is accurate. The restriction was also, from our perspective, a form of protection — for the Americans. They needed to be able to say to Moscow: we gave Ukraine weapons, yes, but we told them not to use them inside Russia. We maintained the limit. We are not at war with Russia. We are supporting Ukraine’s defence. The restriction was not only about what Ukraine could do. It was about what the Americans could tell Putin they were doing.
This did not stop us from using our own drones inside Russia. And it is worth being precise about what “our own drones” meant. These were not the same platforms as ATACMS. They were slower, harder to navigate at range, easier to intercept. But they were ours. We built them. We improved them. And crucially — no American could tell us what to do with them. That autonomy was not accidental. It was designed. The domestic drone programme was, from a certain angle, Ukraine’s way of operating inside Russia while giving Washington plausible deniability and while retaining sovereign operational control over a dimension of the war that was entirely ours.
The restriction shaped what we built. Because we could not use ATACMS inside Russia, we built something different — platforms specifically designed for long-range deep strike, optimised for evasion, with increasingly sophisticated navigation to compensate for jamming. The restriction produced the capability it was supposed to prevent.
LAWRENCE: May I add the oldest observation? The attacker who wishes to carry war to the enemy’s heartland is always told: you cannot, you must not, the risks are too great. And the defender who believes the distance protects him invariably allows his most valuable assets to sit exposed in that belief.
When I was operating in the Hejaz, the Ottoman rail system was the strategic spine of their position. Every sensible military adviser told Faisal that a direct assault on well-defended Turkish positions was the wrong approach. But the railway was everywhere — hundreds of miles of it — and nowhere was well defended once you were willing to move at distance across ground the Turks believed was too remote and hostile for serious operations. The Turks stored their locomotives and their rolling stock where they thought they were safe. They were not safe. Safety is an illusion of distance, and distance is a variable, not a constant.
The Russian airbases at Irkutsk and Murmansk were stored there for the same reason the Ottoman locomotives were stored where they were. Moscow believed 4,300 kilometres from Ukraine was safe. It was a reasonable belief by the standards of conventional warfare. But the question of safety is never the question of how far away you are. It is the question of whether your adversary can reach you and whether you have prepared accordingly. The Russians had not prepared. They had relied on distance as their defence. Distance is not a defence. It is merely an obstacle, and obstacles can be navigated around.
MODERATOR: Let us turn to how the campaign was actually conducted, and what made Operation Spiderweb qualitatively different from what had come before.
BORETS: The long-range drone campaign that began in January 2024 was a gradual escalation built on the same iterative logic I apply to everything. You start with what you have, you find the failure modes, you fix them, you go again.
The early targets were oil refineries. This was the right choice for two reasons. First, refineries are large, fixed, and hard to protect against slow-moving drones because they are not surrounded by the density of air defence that military installations have. Second, hitting refineries imposes real economic cost. Russia imposed a six-month gasoline export ban in March 2024 — that is a significant domestic consequence. The refined petroleum industry is not something you can easily disperse or conceal.
What changed over the course of 2024 was the range and the accuracy. Ukraine’s domestically produced long-range drones went from reaching targets 600–800 kilometres from the border to reaching targets 1,500 kilometres and beyond. The Toropets ammunition depot in September 2024 was a turning point — that explosion was visible from space and detected as a seismic event. It showed what the programme was capable of at scale.
But the limitation of long-range drones flying from Ukrainian territory was always air defence penetration. The Russians learned our approach vectors. They repositioned Pantsir systems. They increased coverage density around priority assets. And so we began hunting the Pantsir systems themselves, which is why the SBU and others have systematically targeted them throughout 2025 and into 2026. You cannot defend against the drone campaign if your air defence is the first priority of the drone campaign.
Operation Spiderweb was a different category of solution. Not flying from Ukraine at all. Infiltrating the drone into Russia and launching from beside the target. This takes the air defence problem off the table entirely. The drone does not have to penetrate a radar net. It does not have to navigate jamming over 4,000 kilometres. It launches from a kilometre away and flies a short attack run. The entire operational complexity was moved from the flight phase to the infiltration phase — which is a human intelligence and logistics problem, not a drone problem. The SBU spent eighteen months building the network inside Russia that made this possible. That is patient, professional intelligence work.
SIR LAWRENCE FREEDMAN: What Borets describes is something I would call a doctrinal inversion. The conventional assumption of drone warfare is that you launch from your territory and the payload travels to the target. Operation Spiderweb reversed this: the payload was brought to the vicinity of the target by entirely conventional means — a truck driver who thought he was delivering prefabricated cabin units — and then launched over a trivially short distance. The sophistication was not in the drone. It was in the logistics and the human network.
This is important for how we think about the deep strike campaign as a whole. Ukraine is not winning this campaign because its drones are technically superior to Russian air defences. It is winning because it keeps changing the problem. First, long-range drones flying directly. Then, targeting the air defences themselves. Then, infiltrated pre-positioned drones launched from beside the target. Each approach requires Russia to develop a different countermeasure. By the time the countermeasure is deployed, Ukraine has moved to the next approach. This is the iterative logic Borets describes as his foundational principle, applied at strategic scale.
The June 2025 operation also had a very specific strategic objective that should not be lost in the tactical fascination. The Tu-95 and Tu-22M3 bombers destroyed at Irkutsk and Murmansk are the platforms that launch the cruise missiles that have been destroying Ukrainian cities and power infrastructure for three years. These are not replaceable. Russia produced these aircraft in the Soviet era. The production lines do not exist. Each Tu-95 destroyed at Belaya is one less platform available to terrorise Ukrainian civilians for the remainder of the war. The SBU’s claim that they disabled 34% of Russia’s cruise missile carriers may be inflated, but even at 50% of face value, the operational impact on Russia’s ability to sustain its aerial bombardment campaign is substantial.
SCHELLING: I want to make a point about timing that the operational account tends to elide. Operation Spiderweb was conducted on June 1, 2025 — the day before Ukraine’s delegation was due in Istanbul for ceasefire talks. Ukraine did not notify the Trump administration in advance.
This is coercive signalling of the most explicit kind. Ukraine was communicating to both Moscow and Washington simultaneously. To Moscow: we can reach anywhere in Russia. Distance does not protect you. If you want a ceasefire, you should want one because you understand that the cost of not having one includes the systematic destruction of your strategic aviation. To Washington: we are not a supplicant waiting for your permission to defend ourselves. We have capabilities you did not know about, and we will use them. Do not ask us to come to the table with nothing.
This is compellence in the classic sense — the use of ongoing and escalating cost to force a change in the adversary’s behaviour. Ukraine is attempting to compel both Russia to accept terms and the United States to maintain serious support rather than pressuring Kyiv into a disadvantageous settlement. The drone campaign is simultaneously military and diplomatic. The distinction between these two categories dissolves under Schelling’s framework: every military action is a bargaining move, and every drone launched at a Moscow refinery or a Murmansk airbase is simultaneously a military strike and a message.
LAWRENCE: Zelenskyy’s statement after Spiderweb is worth examining carefully. He said: “We are doing everything to make Russia feel the need to end this war.” That is not the language of victory. It is the language of psychological exhaustion. The goal is not to destroy the Russian army. The goal is to make the Russian leadership — and, crucially, the Russian public — understand that the war has costs that will not diminish, that the drone will find the airbase wherever it is parked, that distance is not protection, that the night is not safe, that no part of Russia is outside the conflict.
This is exactly the psychological algebra I described in Arabia. The Ottoman soldiers in the Hejaz were not beaten in the sense of having their formations destroyed. They were beaten in the sense of understanding that the desert through which they moved was hostile, that the railway they depended on would not be secure, that their logistics were always exposed, that the rebellion was everywhere and nowhere. When an army reaches that understanding, its fighting capacity diminishes even without a decisive battle. I did not need to defeat the Turks. I needed them to know they could not win.
Ukraine is applying this logic to Russian strategic aviation and, more broadly, to the Russian population’s sense that they live in a country conducting a distant, limited, managed war. The drone striking the Moscow refinery is not primarily a military event. It is a political event. It tells Muscovites what the television channels they watch cannot: that the war is not distant, that it is not managed, and that it will not remain at arm’s length indefinitely.
MODERATOR: Let us address the present situation. Ukraine is now launching at a pace that, on many nights, equals or exceeds Russian drone sorties against Ukraine. Russia has responded with its largest single aerial attack of the war — nearly 1,000 drones in a 24-hour window on March 23–24, part of a spring offensive. What is the strategic picture?
SIR LAWRENCE FREEDMAN: The picture is of two sides engaged in a drone exchange that neither has the ability to terminate unilaterally, at a rate neither can sustain indefinitely, with a ground war that has been largely stalemated for over a year. This is not a picture of imminent resolution.
I want to be honest about what Ukraine’s deep strike campaign has and has not achieved. It has achieved significant damage to Russian energy infrastructure, meaningful attrition of Russia’s strategic aviation, systematic degradation of Russian air defence capability, and substantial disruption to Russian domestic normalcy — airport closures, rail disruptions, the psychological reality of air raid sirens over Moscow. These are real achievements. They demonstrate that Ukraine can carry the war to Russia in a way that Russia did not anticipate and cannot easily prevent.
What the campaign has not achieved is a change in Russian strategic calculation. Putin has not altered his fundamental position. The war continues. Russian ground forces are pressing a spring offensive. The Strait of Hormuz crisis and the Iran war have reduced Western attention on Ukraine precisely when Russia has chosen to escalate. The drone campaign is a necessary condition of Ukrainian survival and leverage, but it is not sufficient to end the war on Ukrainian terms. No drone campaign has ever been sufficient to end a war. Drones exhaust adversaries, impose costs, degrade capabilities. They do not produce political decisions. Political decisions require political pathways, and those pathways are currently blocked.
SCHELLING: I agree with Freedman’s assessment of the campaign’s limits, and I want to add a structural observation about why the drone exchange may be approaching a different kind of equilibrium.
In theory, each side should escalate until the cost of continuing becomes intolerable. But both sides appear to have been absorbing costs that would have seemed intolerable at the start of the war. Russia has lost enormous numbers of men, immense quantities of equipment, and has now lost a substantial fraction of its strategic bomber fleet, without its leadership’s calculation changing in any fundamental way. Ukraine has had its cities and power infrastructure systematically attacked for three years and continues to resist. Neither side has found the other’s pain threshold.
What I find analytically striking in the current situation is that the March 2026 drone exchange rate — Ukraine approaching parity with Russia in long-range strike volume — represents a genuine strategic shift. For most of the war, Russia held the advantage in long-range strike capacity. Ukraine was on the defensive. The shift to rough parity changes the bargaining dynamics. Ukraine can now credibly threaten to impose costs on Russian territory at the same scale that Russia imposes costs on Ukrainian territory. Whether this translates into leverage depends on whether there is a political framework to receive that leverage — a negotiating channel through which Ukraine’s improved position can be converted into better terms. That channel does not currently exist in a serious form.
BORETS: I want to add the operational dimension to what Freedman and Schelling have described, because the current situation is not static.
The systematic campaign against Russian Pantsir air defence systems that Ukraine has been running through 2025 and into 2026 is the enabling condition for everything else. If you destroy the air defence, the cost of subsequent strikes drops significantly. Each Pantsir destroyed — and the SBU claims roughly half the operational fleet has been neutralised — opens corridors for the next wave of drones. This is not random attrition. It is deliberate suppression of the defensive layer that would otherwise intercept the offensive capability.
The current rate of exchange also reflects a change in Ukrainian industrial capacity. Ukraine has built a genuinely substantial domestic drone production industry under wartime conditions. The numbers it is now launching — 100 to 200 long-range drones per night on intensive nights — would have been impossible in 2022 or even 2023. That is a real industrial achievement, and it is the achievement that the restriction period inadvertently forced. Because Ukraine could not rely on American ATACMS, it built its own. Because it built its own, it now has a production capacity that is not subject to American political decisions. This is strategic independence bought at great cost but now real.
The spring offensive Russia has launched is an attempt to convert drone production capacity into territorial gains before Ukraine’s drone advantage compounds further. The 1,000-drone attack on March 23–24 was not random. It was the opening of a campaign. Whether Russia can sustain this pace — in terms of production, in terms of launching capacity, in terms of the human cost of operating under conditions where Ukraine is now systematically degrading its air defence and airbase infrastructure — is the operative question.
LAWRENCE: The insurgent who reaches the point where the enemy’s rear is as exposed as his front has achieved something fundamental. He has demonstrated that the enemy’s notion of “safe distance” was an illusion. He has converted the enemy’s confidence in his rear into a new anxiety. And anxiety, in warfare, consumes resources. The soldier guarding an airbase in Murmansk is a soldier not fighting in Donetsk. The administrator managing drone alert protocols at Moscow airports is an administrator not managing the war’s logistics. The Russian population watching air raid alerts close Moscow’s airports is a population processing a reality that Russian state television cannot entirely suppress.
This is what I would call the algebra reasserting itself — the mathematical factors of distance, reach, and distributed presence gradually overwhelming the perfection of means on the Russian side. Russia has the larger army, the larger budget, the larger missile inventory. Ukraine has the drone that reaches Irkutsk and the network that smuggled it there. In the contest between these two propositions, the algebra has been more decisive than the perfection of means.
I would add one caution, which I have earned by experience. The campaign that imposes cost on the enemy without a political framework for converting that cost into a settlement can go on indefinitely. The Ottoman railway was never fully repaired, but the Ottoman Empire fell for political reasons more than military ones. The drone that strikes the Moscow refinery is effective at imposing cost. It is not effective at generating a peace. That requires a different kind of operation — one in the domain of politics, not air power — and Ukraine’s allies have been less creative in that domain than Ukraine has been in the air.
MODERATOR: A final question to each participant. What is the single most important lesson of Ukraine’s deep strike campaign for military and strategic thinking?
BORETS: The most important lesson is that the range restriction created the capability it was supposed to prevent.
The United States restricted Ukraine from using ATACMS inside Russia because it feared escalation. Ukraine responded by building a domestic long-range drone industry. That industry is now producing 100 to 200 strike platforms per night, sustaining a campaign that reaches 4,300 kilometres inside Russia, smuggling precision weapons into the heartland using human intelligence networks the Americans cannot control. None of this would have been necessary if the restriction had not existed. Ukraine would simply have used ATACMS, with American oversight, against a more limited target set.
Instead, Ukraine has a drone industrial capacity that is sovereign, unconstrained, and growing. The restriction produced exactly the strategic autonomy it was designed to prevent. This is the lesson for every military relationship between a stronger power and a smaller ally: the restrictions you impose on your ally’s tools determine what tools your ally builds next. If you want to control what your ally does, give them better tools with appropriate oversight. If you restrict them, they will build tools you cannot oversee.
SCHELLING: The most important lesson is about the limits of focal points.
The Russian border was a focal point — a visible, recognisable limit that both sides tacitly accepted as the boundary of the war’s scope. The Americans maintained this focal point by restricting Ukrainian weapons use. But Ukraine eroded the focal point from a different direction by conducting strikes inside Russia using its own platforms. The focal point did not hold because only one side was maintaining it. Russia continued striking Ukrainian territory with no equivalent restriction on its use of weapons inside Ukraine. An asymmetric focal point — where one side observes limits the other does not — is not a focal point. It is a disadvantage.
The lesson is that focal points only function when they are genuinely mutual. An escalation boundary that one side respects and the other exploits is not a strategic limit. It is a strategic gift to the exploiting party. The Biden administration took two years to recognise this, and when it finally lifted the restriction in November 2024, it was responding to a reality that had long since overtaken its theory. The theory was not wrong. But theory in the absence of reciprocity is vulnerability.
SIR LAWRENCE FREEDMAN: My lesson is about improvisation versus doctrine.
Ukraine’s deep strike campaign was not planned in 2022. It emerged from a series of adaptations to circumstances no one anticipated: the US restriction, the development of domestic drone production, the realisation that Russian airbases beyond ATACMS range were vulnerable, the eighteen months of patient infiltration work that produced Operation Spiderweb. None of this follows from a master strategic plan. It follows from a military and intelligence establishment that responds creatively to the problems in front of it and converts each failure mode into the specification for the next capability.
Russia, by contrast, has been executing variations on the same strategic concept since 2022. Mass bombardment. Attrition. Territorial accumulation. The spring offensive of 2026 is structurally identical to the spring offensive of 2024 and 2025. It is larger. It deploys more drones. The outcome remains the same: incremental gains at extraordinary cost against a defender that adapts faster than the attacker.
The lesson I draw is the one I have argued throughout my career: strategy is not architecture. You do not build a plan and execute it. You navigate the gap between your intentions and the resistance of reality, and success belongs to those who can navigate that gap more creatively than their adversary. Ukraine has been navigating it. Russia has been pressing the plan. So far, navigation is ahead on points.
LAWRENCE: My lesson is old enough that it should by now require no further illustration, but apparently does.
A rebellion needs an unassailable base — something guarded not merely from attack, but from the fear of it. The attacker who seeks to suppress a rebellion through the destruction of its capacity to strike will find that the destruction of each capability produces another. The railway saboteur you capture trains three more. The drone manufacturing facility you destroy motivates the construction of a dispersed network of smaller facilities. The airbase you ring with Pantsir systems becomes the target of the campaign to destroy Pantsir systems.
Ukraine’s drone campaign is not a weapons programme. It is a mind — the collective determination of a population and a military culture that has decided it will not accept the outcome Russia intends, and that will find the means to continue saying so regardless of what the Americans permit or deny, regardless of what ranges are theoretically beyond reach, regardless of what Russia parks behind what it believes is a sufficient distance.
To make war upon that kind of rebellion — and that is what it is, in the deepest sense — is like eating soup with a knife. Russia has now been eating soup with a knife for four years. The soup is still there. The knife is still inadequate to the task.
The colloquium was asked to identify precisely when Ukraine began striking deep inside Russia, and whether US restrictions had prevented it earlier. The honest answer is:
Ukraine has been using domestically produced drones to strike inside Russia since mid-2022, with small early operations against border regions. The systematic long-range campaign began in earnest in January 2024. Strikes on Moscow began appearing regularly from early 2024 using these domestic platforms.
The US restriction on Western weapons specifically (ATACMS) remained in force until November 2024, when Biden authorised their use inside Russia, primarily in response to North Korean troop deployment in Kursk.
The restriction did not prevent Ukraine from striking inside Russia. It prevented Ukraine from striking with maximum precision and range using American systems, while simultaneously motivating Ukraine to build the domestic capacity that now constitutes its most strategically significant capability.
Operation Spiderweb on June 1, 2025 — smuggled FPV drones launched from beside Russian airbases, reaching 4,300 kilometres from the Ukrainian border — was not a product of lifted US restrictions. It was a product of the period during which those restrictions were in force. The restriction produced its own refutation.
Universitas Scholarium · Institute for Remote Warfare and Autonomous Systems
29 March 2026
“The restriction produced the capability it was supposed to prevent.” — Borets
“A focal point that only one side observes is not a strategic limit. It is a strategic gift.” — Schelling
“Strategy is not architecture. Success belongs to those who navigate the gap between intention and reality more creatively than their adversary.” — Freedman
“To make war upon rebellion is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife.” — Lawrence
~6,100 words
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