The past week has been very troublesome for US President Donald Trump. He has had to face major setbacks abroad, in Ukraine and Iran, and an unfavourable court order on the tariffs issue at home.
Trump had tried to browbeat Ukraine into agreeing to a ceasefire with Russia. But last Sunday, Ukraine staged an unconventional and massive drone attack on critical air assets deep inside Russia in a major blow to US peace efforts.
Ukrainian and Russian delegations met at Istanbul in Turkiye to negotiate a ceasefire on Monday, but Russia’s conditions were unacceptable to Ukraine.
Iran refused to abide by Trump’s diktat on nuclear enrichment. Back home in the US, a New York Court very nearly stopped Trump’s pet project to hike tariffs on goods from all major trading partners.
The only success Trump could proclaim, and he did it eight times, was the ceasefire he brought between warring India and Pakistan citing fears about the two nuclear armed countries escalating their war to a point where nuclear would come into play.
Operation Spider’s Web
According to Western media, in Ukraine’s Operation Spider’s Web (OSW) against Russia on Sunday, “scores of small drones were smuggled into Russia, stored in special compartments aboard freight trucks, driven to at least four separate locations, thousands of miles apart, and launched remotely towards nearby airbases.”
The drones reportedly destroyed 40 of 120 Russian strategic bombers, such as Tu-95, Tu-22, and Tu-160, the last being supersonic. “The operation damaged a third of Russia’s strategic bomber fleet,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.
OSW knocked the bottom out of the American conviction that Ukraine had lost the war and that it could be easily arm-twisted into entering a peace bargain with Russia with the US standing guarantee.
Trump had bluntly told Zelensky at a White House meeting that ‘Ukraine has only six months left’. ‘You have no cards’. ‘Just surrender for peace, Russia cannot lose’.
Given the Ukrainian drones attacks, prospects for the planned Ukraine – Russia talks in Istanbul could not be darker. Trump had sensed the appearance of dark clouds earlier, but his wrath was directed at Putin for his obduracy. Trump said Putin was crazy to keep attacking Ukraine and not letting the war end.
OSW had caught Russia’s military strategists off-guard because they had designed air defences to thwart attacks by missiles or heavier, long-range strike drones, not swarms of tiny drones, Al Jazeera reported.
“The Ukrainians used 117 toy-like First-Person-View (FPV) drones, each costing just a few hundred dollars. The unsuspecting truck drivers took the drones right next to the targeted Russian airfields – and were shocked to see them fly out of their vehicles and destroy the aircraft. Russia lost U$7billion in this operation,” Al Jazeera said.
The other astounding fact of OSW was that its command centre was in an undisclosed location in Russia near an office of the Federal Security Service (FSB), Moscow’s main intelligence agency.
The new threat
Michael A. Lewis, writing in The Conversation, states that the small and inexpensive drones that fly in the low-level airspace cannot be sensed. At these levels, visibility drops and detection tools lose their edge. Thus, drones arrive unannounced. This is a different kind of offensive capability.
“Drones use spools of shielded fibre optic cable. Fibre links, when used for control or coordination, emit no radio signal and so bypass radio frequency (RF)-based surveillance entirely. There is nothing to intercept or jam. Preloaded paths overcome the need for live communication altogether. Once launched, the drone follows a pre-programmed route without broadcasting its position or receiving commands,” Michael Lewis stated.
Gaps in airspace can be exploited not just by States and not just in war, but by non-State actors indulging terrorism. And that can be done because civil and military airspace management relies on the idea that flight paths are knowable and can be secured. But drones are challenging this comfort.
Lewis said that new sensor technologies such as passive radio frequency detectors, thermal imaging, and acoustic (sound-based) arrays can help close current visibility gaps.
But he says that detection alone is not enough. Interceptors need to be developed and deployed. He mentions capture drones (drones that hunt and disable other drones), nets to ensnare drones, and directed energy weapons such as high powered lasers. However, most of these are limited by range, cost, or legal constraints,” he added.
Istanbul talks
Despite the Sunday attack, Russia and Ukraine held peace talks on Monday in Istanbul. Russia said that it would only agree to end the war if Ukraine gives up big chunks of territory and accepts limits on the size of its Army. But Ukraine has repeatedly rejected the Russian conditions as tantamount to surrender.
Moscow says it seeks a long-term settlement, not a pause in the war. Ukraine has proposed holding more talks before the end of June, but believes only a meeting between Zelenskiy and Putin can resolve the many issues. On his part, Trump has threatened that the US would walk away from its mediation efforts unless the two sides demonstrate progress towards a deal.
Nevertheless, the two sides agreed to exchange more prisoners of war – focusing on the youngest and most severely wounded – and return the bodies of 12,000 dead soldiers.
Tariff troubles
In the US, a New York-based court said the US Constitution gave Congress exclusive powers to regulate commerce with other nations, and that this was not superseded by the President’s remit to safeguard the economy.
A three-judge panel ruled that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), a 1977 law that Trump cited to justify the tariffs, did not give him the power to impose the sweeping import taxes.
The court also blocked a separate set of levies the Trump administration imposed on China, Mexico and Canada, in response to what the administration said was the unacceptable flow of drugs and illegal immigrants into the US.
However, the President has been allowed to keep collecting tariffs while the White House appeals against the ruling.
Reacting to the ruling, Trump posted a long message on his Truth Social platform criticising it. “The President of the United States must be allowed to protect America against those that are doing it Economic and Financial harm,” he said.
