Note the insane asymmetry at play here: a fairly poor country just took out a good chunk of the nuclear capability of a former world power for absolute peanuts.
> former world power
Russia still is a nuclear hyper-power, people here in Europe kind of seem to forget that, for whatever reason. Still a big L for Russia, of course, but they've have many wars with such big Ls, wars which they've eventually won.
More generally, this puts all the nuclear strategists, on both sides (three, I guess, if we're also counting China as an up-and-coming nuclear hyper-power) back to re-write almost everything that has been written in the last 60 or so years when it comes to nuclear strategy. Irkutsk was supposed to be un-reachable by conventional means, which I guess is also the calculation done by the Americans when it comes to their nuclear and strategic air bases located in places like North Dakota or Wyoming, that doesn't seem to be the case anymore.
There is the other way, and you're observing it yourself.
Underestimating Ukraine is the regular trope of the west for all of Ukraine's independence.
Ukrainians in mil-tech who interact with NATO regularly mention that the alliance is significantly behind on the modern warfare tech and the gap increases every day.
The tech and the infrastructure required for that is non trivial and is being built and evolves every day.
Most likely, for this specific case the civilian infrastructure was used for relaying traffic. This is one of the reason why Russia shuts down internet in the areas of deep aerial drone strikes.
Keep in mind that according to the reports this operation was planned for more than a year and was not something done without deep planning.
I have seen some comments speculating that the trucks relayed 5G signals to the drones.
This happens to have been a drone operation.
>But this wouldn’t have been possible without top-notch reconnaissance and especially communication
Ukrainian intelligence has been focused near-exclusively on Russia for more than a decade, and they likely have more human intelligence assets in Russia right now than the US has ever had.
>you need satellite communications for that (or somehow UA infiltrating RU’s network and using it at will, undetected).
another way of writing that would be "acquiring a couple dozen Russian SIM cards and pairing them with the kind of cellular radios half the planet has in their pocket right now".
No aspects of this operation require any particularly advanced technology or intelligence.
Technically speaking, this is a hobby-level undertaking. A model airplane club could "supervise" such an operation.
Skills needed:
1. Build a mechanism to remotely open the roof of a cargo container.
2. Add a GPS tracker to the container to follow its position.
3. Build a signal repeater that uses commercial cellular service to provide connectivity to the container.
4. Tape explosives to toy drones and wire their detonators to a drone function that can serve as a trigger.
Which one do you reckon would be too difficult for a group of 16-year-olds who know their way around Arduino?
It's been said Trump wasn't told till after it happened which is understandable with him being kinda pro Russian.