内容摘要：on 1 June, targeting what it said were nuclear-capable long-range bombers.

on 1 June, targeting what it said were nuclear-capable long-range bombers.

Of all the aircraft targeted by Operation Spider's Web, the A-50, with its radar capable of seeing targets and threats more than 600km (372 miles) away, is arguably the most important.Before the full-scale invasion in 2022, Russia was thought to operate around nine A-50s. Before last Sunday, as many as three had been shot down or damaged in an earlier drone attack.

The latest footage strongly implies that drones hit the circular radar domes of the two A-50s parked at the Ivanovo Severny airbase, north-east of Moscow.However, since the video feed cuts out at the moment of impact, this is hard to completely verify.Satellite imagery, which clearly displays the wreckage of numerous bombers, is inconclusive when it comes to the A-50.

But Russia's fleet of these crucial aircraft could now be down to as few as four."Restarting production of the A-50 is presently highly unlikely, due to difficulties with import substitution and the destruction of production facilities," defence analyst Serhii Kuzan told me.

"As such, every loss of this type of aircraft constitutes a strategic problem for Russia, one it cannot quickly compensate for."

Earlier on Wednesday, the SBU offered a brief glimpse into another of Sunday's remarkable features: the use of specially constructed containers, mounted on flatbed trucks, to transport armed drones to sites close to the four Russian airbases.Did they follow the traditional path after a mass lay-off and head to the nearest pub? "We had a very large party at my house. Otherwise it would have been pretty awful to have put all that effort into the company and not mark it in some way."

His former colleague Kathryn Evans headed up the space effort, the work around hypersonic flight for the Ministry of Defence and opportunities to apply the technology in any other commercial areas.When did she know the game was up? "It's tricky to say when I knew it was going wrong, I was very hopeful to the end. While there was a lot of uncertainty there was a strong pipeline of opportunities."

She remembers the moment the axe fell and she joined 200 colleagues in the HQ's auditorium."It was the 31st of October, a Thursday, I knew it was bad news but when you're made redundant with immediate effect there's no time to think about it. We'd all been fighting right to the end so then my adrenalin crashed."