> 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.