SHORTLY AFTER noon on June 1st, Russian social media began flashing, alerting the world to Ukraine’s most audacious operation on Russian territory to date. In Irkutsk province in eastern Siberia, some 4,000km from Ukraine, locals posted footage of small quadcopter drones emerging from lorries and flying toward a nearby airfield, home to some of Russia’s most important strategic bombers. “I work at a tyre shop,” one wrote. “A lorry pulled in, and drones flew out of it.” From an airbase near Murmansk, in Russia’s far north, came similar stories: “The driver’s running around…drones are flying from his lorry toward the base.” Other alarmed posts soon followed from airbases in Ryazan and Ivanovo provinces, deep in central Russia.