It is now a week since the Ukrainians launched the most audacious raid since The Dambusters – an operation that was all the more stunning for being completely unassisted by the UK or any other western power.

The Ukrainians have spent the last 18 months preparing Operation Spiderweb in total secrecy, and it has taken a few days to grasp the sheer brilliance of what they did. We now know that they mysteriously assembled the 117 drones in Russia itself, and then packed them in specially designed lorries.

We know that they somehow bamboozled the lorry drivers to park them near air bases all over Russia, one of them 4,000 miles from Ukraine; and we can just about understand how they managed remotely to retract the roofs of the lorries and how the drones swarmed out and destroyed a big chunk of Russia’s aerial strike forces – crucial planes that cannot be replaced, since they are no longer being made.

We saw the nosecam footage as the drones blew up the Tupolevs. We saw the aerial footage of the bases, giant bombers swatted on the runways like broken insects. Since the whole exploit was so heroic, and such wonderful news for Ukraine and the west, there was one aspect of the story that remains baffling – and that is the sheer tepidity of the western response.

Where was the instant message of congratulation – from Starmer to Zelensky? What was the view of the Foreign Office? This was front page news around the world, but I have scoured the record and I still can’t find a reaction of any kind from Foreign Secretary David Lammy.

What about John Healey, the Defence Secretary? I have known Healey for many years and always found him a decent man. After all the billions we have spent supporting the Ukrainians, you might have expected him to cheer this piece of good news. He has been completely schtum.

Perhaps it would help unzip the lips of the Labour government if I remind them what these Tupolevs have been doing in the last three years. In the hands of Vladimir Putin, they have been instruments of pure evil. They have been sent up day after day to fire cruise missiles or glide bombs at Ukraine; and the Ukrainians have been unable to intercept these planes because they do not even enter Ukrainian air space.

They ‘stand off’ from their targets, hundreds of miles away, and rain down hell. Putin has so far launched 32,000 attacks on civilian targets in Ukraine. In fact the majority of his strikes have been on civilians. He has hit shopping malls and railway stations and countless apartment blocks. He has killed or injured tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians, including at least 632 children among the dead.

This should be a moment for positive exultation, because Putin’s potential for carnage and mayhem has been reduced, writes Johnson.

This should be a moment for positive exultation, because Putin’s potential for carnage and mayhem has been reduced, writes Johnson.

He has blown up babies in their cots and these big Tupolevs have made it possible. It is also these planes and their glide bombs that have pounded the Ukrainian positions in the east of the country – so allowing Putin’s forces to make what glacial progress they have. Without Putin’s air power, without that constant battering from above, the Ukrainians would find it far easier to hold their positions – and the Russians would almost certainly be in retreat.

The Russians could not have occupied Ukrainian land without this advantage; and remember what happens to the land they take. Whenever the Russians have conquered a Ukrainian town or village, they have launched an instant and vicious programme of Russification.

Ukrainian books are removed from the library shelves. The Ukrainian language is no longer taught in schools. Ukrainians come under intense pressure to take up Russian citizenship or else lose their right to services such as healthcare. There have been proven instances of Ukrainian men being castrated – to stop them producing more Ukrainians. The churches of the Ukrainian Orthodox faith – indeed of any faith not explicitly loyal to Moscow – have been closed, their priests shot or jailed.

Most diabolical of all, Putin has systematically kidnapped Ukrainian children – some say 20,000, some say as many as 100,000 – and taken them to Russia to become Russians, to abjure their homeland and to become loyal to Putin himself. Those are just some of the war crimes that these planes have enabled – those ones burned and wrecked on the Tarmac.

In so far as they were a part of the Russian nuclear strike force, they were, additionally, a threat to our own country.

So I return to my question: why has the British state been so bashful and so nervous? Why have we refused publicly to share in Ukrainian joy? This should be a moment for positive exultation, because Putin’s potential for carnage and mayhem has been reduced. So why the silence?

I think you can guess the answer. It’s the same old nonsense, the same old rubbish about not ‘provoking Putin’, or ‘poking the bear’. It’s the same old unfounded and superstitious dread that one day we will push the Kremlin tyrant too far and that he will ‘escalate’.

What about nukes, people say croakily. What if he decides to detonate a battlefield tactical nuclear weapon? What then? Well, I have an inkling of Nato planning for that vanishingly remote possibility – and I can tell you that Putin would be utterly insane to do any such thing, because the western response would be such as to lead swiftly to the end of him and his regime.

If he went nuclear in any way, he would instantly lose Chinese backing; he would lose his supporters in the Middle East and around the world. He would lose his own people, who would be rightly terrified of the reprisals – and he would not even stop the Ukrainians. They would fight on, believe me.

Operation Spiderweb reminds us that the Ukrainians will never be beaten and that they will use all their technological genius to inflict ever more unexpected humiliations on Russia – until Putin is finally willing to show some common sense, and do the right thing by his own country and the world: that is, to confirm what Russia agreed by law more than 30 years ago – that Ukraine is a free, sovereign and independent country. That’s all.

The operation has also confirmed something vital about Russia. By eluding all Putin’s spies and intelligence agencies – and by undoubtedly making use of Russian assistance inside Russia itself – the Ukrainians have revealed the fundamental rottenness of the Russian state. From the very beginning, it has been clear that Putin is battling endemic problems of cheating and corruption in the Russian armed forces.

His armoured cars had the wrong tyres – because someone was stealing. He was told that the security services had paid a fortune on fifth columnists in Kyiv – who were going to rise and overwhelm the Zelensky regime. It was rubbish. They didn’t exist.

Putin suffers from the fundamental weakness of the autocratic state: that he listens to a tiny core of yes men who are themselves lied to by others. That is his fatal weakness.

Putin will fail – and Putin must fail. Indeed, that used to be the official policy of the UK government. He will fail the faster if we all recover the courage to say so.

Glory to Ukraine for Operation Spiderweb.

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