Helmets off to the Ukrainians for giving the Russian aggressors a humiliating black eye and the loss of $7 billion in military hardware using 117 relatively cheap drones.

Yes, war is hell and that pain should be felt by the instigators of war (like Vladimir Putin) and not just the victims (like Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy). What the Ukrainians did was smuggle the drones into Russian territory to strike at some 40 Russian bombers, about a third of that nation’s strategic cruise missile carriers.

This is no Pearl Harbor sneak attack or some manner of terrorism. A state of war has existed since Russia’s February 2022 invasion because of Putin’s imperialist designs. This strike, as far east as Siberia and as far north as the Arctic, was only a surprise insofar as Ukrainian security forces cleverly organized it in a way that the Russians could not effectively counter.

Unlike a terrorist attack, Ukrainian forces did not kill any civilians in this operation; in fact, so far there are no reports even of Russian service members dying in the drone bombings.

It was surgically designed to affect exclusively Russian military hardware, hardware of the sort that Russia has been using to mount its own strikes on Ukraine, far less scrupulously aware of civilian casualties. On Sunday, Russia used its own drones to attack Ukrainian territory in retaliation, including the city of Zaporizhzhia, reportedly killing and injuring dozens of civilians.

Some might claim that this is a misguided move just ahead of another round of peace talks that began in Istanbul, potentially derailing the conversations before they got underway. Yet, Ukraine says that this operation was in the works for about a year and a half, and it can’t well let supposed peace talks — talks to which Putin himself seems only ambivalently committed — block what it must do to safeguard its territorial integrity and people.

Every wrecked Russian war plane is one that can’t go on bombing runs over Ukrainian cities.

In any case, this helps strengthen Ukraine’s position going into the conversations. Zelenskyy and his generals have once more demonstrated that, in the face of the Kremlin’s significant raw military advantage, they are capable of utilizing strategy, technology, creativity and general willpower to even the scales far more than Putin had ever expected when he launched the war, thinking he’d be appointing a governor in Kyiv within a week. The Russian tyrant has now cost his country hundreds of thousands of lives and huge portions of its military capability.

Perhaps this will be on Russian negotiators’ minds as they meet their Ukrainian counterparts this week. Who knows what else Russia might lose fighting this grinding war of attrition, imperiling its economy, its population and its own defensive capabilities. We understand that what Putin wants most of all is to be able to say that he won, that he is returning Russia to some imagined former glory.

Yet what he risks is ending up with a Russia that is far more isolated and far weaker than it was when he started. Even longtime admirer President Donald Trump, who once spoke approvingly of the despot’s incursion into his smaller neighbor, has come around to the idea that Putin must be reined in. It’s time for Putin to end this war, not with Ukraine’s subjugation but with its territory kept out of Putin’s hands.

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