DEEP DIVE – Ukraine’s drone attacks against five Russian military bases on Sunday didn’t just take out a third of Moscow’s fleet of strategic bomber aircraft; they landed surprise blows to the Kremlin deep inside Russian territory, and showed what experts called a stunning level of intelligence and operational skill on the part of the Ukrainians.
Kyiv began launching more than 100 drones against Russian air bases on Sunday morning, destroying 41 strategic bombers – including Tu-95 and Tu-22M3 bombers that regularly carry cruise missiles that have been used to devastating effect against Ukrainian cities. Officials say the operation also destroyed A-50 planes, which are used to detect enemy aircraft and missiles, and provide intelligence on targets to Russian fighter jets. Kyiv estimated the damage inflicted by the brazen operation at $ 7 billion.
Ukrainian officials said the operation, codenamed “Spider Web,” was a year and a half in the making. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky touted “the absolutely brilliant result” and described it as Ukraine’s longest-range attacks against Russia to date; some of the targeted bases are thousands of miles from the frontlines in Ukraine.
Analysts are calling the operation “unprecedented,” a “game-changer,” and Ukraine’s “biggest blow of the war.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky touted Kyiv’s success on social media.
“A brilliant operation was carried out – on enemy territory, targeting only military objectives, specifically the equipment used to strike Ukraine,” Zelensky posted to X. “Russia suffered significant losses – entirely justified and deserved.”
But the damage assessments only begin to convey the power and impact of the “Spider Web” operation. More importantly, many experts said, were the details of how it was done, and the damage to the Kremlin’s war effort and sense of impermeability.
“They got them deep, deep inside Russia,” Adm. James Stavridis, a Cipher Brief expert and former NATO Supreme Allied Commander for Europe, told CNN, saying “a way to think about these strikes — this would be like launching from Washington D.C. and attacking targets in Los Angeles.”
Former senior CIA Officer Paul Kolbe told The Cipher Brief, “if overnight, the United States lost one third of its nuclear-capable bomber force, heads would be rolling at every level of the military.”
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How it was done
Ukrainian officials said they had identified the five bases that were targeted as homes to some of Russia’s deadliest delivery systems – the Tu-95 and Tu-22M3 bombers in particular. The bases included one in Siberia and another in Russia’s far north region of Murmansk, both well beyond the range of Ukrainian weapons.
Ukraine chose First-Person View drones (FPV) which typically have a range of only five miles and are far less expensive than most weapons of war. Their operatives then smuggled the drones to sites within striking range of each of the five bases.
The drones were hidden in mobile wooden cabins that were loaded onto 18-wheel delivery trucks that were driven to locations near their targets. Reuters reported that the drones were concealed in the roofs of the cabins, and that early Sunday, the roof panels were opened by remote control, and the drones were released to carry out their strikes.
The operation was reportedly led by Vasyl Malyuk, the chief of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU). President Zelensky said that Ukrainian intelligence agents had managed to work for months inside Russia, and that some operatives had done their planning near a regional headquarters of the Russian Federal Security Service, known as the FSB.
“The Russians are going to have to have a very serious debate amongst themselves on their own internal security,” Ralph Goff, former CIA Chief of Station told The Cipher Brief. The FSB, Goff said, “blew it big time on this one. Not only did the Ukrainians manage to get truckloads of drones into the country, but then they were able to station them near military bases and then carry out the attacks with impunity.”
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The impact
Max Boot, Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the Russian high command must have been as shocked by the “Spider Web” attacks as the Americans were by the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941.
Kolbe and others said that given the current state of the Russian economy, and the time it takes to produce those high-end aircraft, Russia will likely have to fight the remainder of the war with 41 fewer strategic bombers.
“For Russia to lose these bombers, which they're no longer producing, that can carry cruise missiles, that can carry the heavy weapons loads and can fly the distances that they need to get to Ukraine to launch the missiles and return home, let alone to patrol the coasts of Europe, of the UK, of the United States, really is a huge deal for them,” Kolbe said.
“They will not be able to replace this capability anytime in the next decade or possibly decades,” Kolbe added. “And their ability to strike any target, specifically Ukraine, but any other target they might be thinking about down the road in terms of their own deterrence…is profoundly impacted.”
The Russian response was to call the attacks the work of “terrorists” and downplay their impact. The Russian defense ministry also said it had detained an undisclosed number of “participants in the terrorist attacks,” according to the Financial Times, citing state-run media.
But Zelensky said all those involved in the attacks were withdrawn from Russia before the first drones were launched. And he and others in Ukraine stressed that this wasn’t terrorism, but a strike against military hardware that had been used to deadly effect against Ukraine.
A harbinger of future warfare?
Ukrainian innovation in defense technology has already been widely praised and acknowledged by many outside experts, but these attacks offer evidence that low-end weapons can be paired with superior intelligence to do great damage. The drones Ukraine deployed are small, short-range, and relatively cheap, and they took out some of the most valuable planes Russia has at its disposal.
The Economist reported that Western analysts see the attacks as a potential turning point for global conflict, in that “even heavily guarded strategic assets are now susceptible to asymmetric, distributed drone warfare—forcing militaries worldwide to rethink base security, airpower survivability, and the future of deterrence.”
One more lesson from “Spider Web” is that Zelensky and Ukraine still hold some cards. “The fact that they were able to carry out a mission of this scope, with this reach, with these capabilities, without it being tipped off to the Russians or without it being blown in a counterintelligence way means that they really have upped their game,” Goff said. “And it's a necessity. If the West is going to threaten to turn off intelligence sharing, which the Trump administration did briefly earlier this year, if they feel that Western partners in Europe are not able to fill the gap, then they have to do it themselves.”
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