Bogdan Maftei
Erudite Elders
June 4, 2025
In a meticulously planned covert operation eighteen months in the making, Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) launched a precision drone strike that may have delivered one of the most damaging blows to Russia’s long-range strike capability since the full-scale invasion began. Codenamed “Spiderweb,” the operation relied on first-person-view (FPV) drones smuggled deep into Russian territory and concealed in custom-built wooden compartments installed inside commercial cargo trucks. On June 1, the drones were pre-positioned across multiple regions of Russia and triggered remotely at the moment of attack. When the time came, the roofs of the truck-mounted cabins were electronically opened, allowing the drones to launch directly toward their assigned targets: strategic bombers stationed at five key airfields across the country. The result was a coordinated series of strikes that damaged or destroyed 41 Russian long-range bombers, aircraft routinely used to launch cruise missiles at civilian infrastructure across Ukraine.
Five aerodromes formed the Spider Web’s anchor points, each boxed in red on the SBU’s briefing map that leaked within the hour. In Murmansk Oblast, Olenya Air Base and the adjacent naval hub of Severomorsk burned first, twin pillars of smoke curling over the Kola Peninsula. South-west of Moscow, Dyagilevo and Ivanovo erupted in sequence, their flight lines suddenly pocked with secondary detonations. The headline shock, though, came from Belaya in Irkutsk Oblast, nearly four thousand kilometres from Ukraine’s border, where satellite passes on 31 May had counted seven Tu-160s, six Tu-95MS Bears, two Il-78M tankers, six An-26s, two An-12s, thirty-nine Tu-22M3 Backfires and thirty MiG-31 Foxhounds. Olenya’s own 26 May imagery showed eleven Tu-95MS, five An-12s and forty Tu-22M3s. Ukraine’s flight-line video confirmed multiple hits: one Backfire consumed by a sheet of flame after a drone bored through its starboard wing root, another Bear collapsing in on itself as fuel tanks detonated beneath a carpet of spare tyres intended to frustrate top-attack munitions. Within hours President Volodymyr Zelensky went on camera from a gilded Kyiv interior and filled in the missing numbers, one hundred seventeen Ukrainian drones launched from inside Russia, more than forty strategic aircraft disabled or destroyed, roughly thirty-four per cent of the airframes Moscow uses to sling Kh-101 and Kh-55 missiles at civilian power plants.
How the drones reached their start lines is almost as telling as the damage they inflicted. SBU planners smuggled knock-down FPV kits across the Belarusian and Kursk oblast borders in crates labelled as machine parts, reassembled them inside rented warehouses, slotted them into wooden false floors of cargo lorries and hired unsuspecting Russian drivers through grey-market logistics apps. Each truck carried an embedded relay rig, a nest of lithium packs, mesh radios and a collapsible dish, and a roof panel keyed to a remote release. When the vehicle idled at a pre
selected lay-by near an air-field fence, operators back in Ukraine popped the hatch, booted the relay and launched swarms of quadcopters that stayed under treetop height until they broke line-of-sight with the base perimeter. Higher-flying relay drones hopped the control signal eastward until encrypted repeaters on Ukrainian soil could steer the attack. One driver, detained by baffled traffic police near Olenegorsk, reportedly insisted he was paid to deliver empty pallets; another abandoned his KamAZ at a Severomorsk fuel stop and walked away, oblivious to the scorched tyre tracks on the roof.
Strategic arithmetic favours the saboteur. A Tu-95MS built during Brezhnev’s last term is a bespoke alloy of NK-12 engines, counter-rotating props that take months to balance and a cruise-missile launch system designed when the Warsaw Pact still filled central Europe. Even at full wartime mobilisation the Kazan assembly line can turn out, at best, a single Tu-160M every eighteen months, and sanctions have choked off the high-spec composite panels and FADEC circuitry that modernised Bears need to fly. Against that backdrop a six-hundred-euro quadcopter that can torch a bomber is militarily priceless. The SBU’s claim of more than two billion dollars in losses may prove a conservative cut when the absence of spares and the time value of lost cruise-missile salvos are factored in. Operationally the blow lands hardest on Belaya, the nuclear-rated fallback field for Russia’s Long-Range Aviation. Its Tu-160s now face dispersal to second-string strips across Siberia, lengthening route legs and guzzling tanker capacity. Olenya’s Tu-22M3 complement, gutted by fires, dents the Northern Fleet’s maritime strike roster and relaxes pressure on NATO patrol corridors north of the GIUK gap. Dyagilevo and Ivanovo, long considered maintenance hubs with runway depth to spare, must now divert precious engineering teams to perimeter security, jammer caravans and rapid-reaction rifle squads.
Russia’s immediate answer has been to flood the affected regions with conscripts, erect ad-hoc exclusion belts and task Interior-Ministry checkpoints with x-raying every cargo vehicle inside a twenty-kilometre ring. Yet each layer steals manpower from the Donbas trenches, and every cubic metre of reinforced concrete poured around a Siberian revetment is a cubic metre not reinforcing the rail junction at Tokmak. Moscow’s Telegram channels, usually busy celebrating Lancet hits on Ukrainian artillery, spent the day spearing local commanders for lax gate control and excoriating traffic-police officials who waved the decoy lorries through. For the first time in months the information-space momentum tilted sharply toward Kyiv, boosted by Zelensky’s broadcast, which highlighted that the strike was prepared for a year and a half, executed within sight of an FSB office and triggered only after Moscow ignored a U.S.-backed cease-fire draft dated 11 March. Zelensky used the same appearance to flag Ukraine’s readiness for substantive peace talks in Istanbul, contrasted pointedly with Russia’s failure to table any written terms, while underlining that operations like SpiderWeb will continue until missile attacks on Ukrainian cities cease.
Western decision-makers see more than publicity in those words. The deep strike arrived without direct U.S. target data, demonstrating that Ukraine can field long-range options on its own initiative. Congressional holdouts who fear escalation confront the alternative: Kyiv innovating anyway, with success. European capitals juggling depleted stockpiles against domestic politics have a laboratory-grade case study showing that open-source hardware and local software can
yield strategic dividends. For Ukraine the next logical step is a production line for interceptor drones optimised to chase Geran-2s before they reach Odesa’s grain elevators. One front-line counter-UAV detachment already claims fifteen kills in a single night using AI-aided pursuit craft immune to standard Russian jamming, proof that the measure-countermeasure loop now turns on silicon cycles rather than artillery shells.
Moscow will frame the episode as terrorism, yet doing so forces state media to admit that the heartland is vulnerable, a concession that pricks the Kremlin’s carefully curated aura of inviolability. Domestically the effect is already visible: video from Murmansk shows residents filming the plume over Olenya in stunned silence, while Irkutsk social feeds circulate images of smoking Tu-160 tail sections next to once-immaculate snow berms. The fear is contagious; Engels-2 crews scrambled Bears into holding patterns over the Volga at first light, burning turbine hours simply to keep airframes off the ground while security teams swept parking stands for hidden rotors.
In strictly military terms the raid rebalances the winter outlook. Fewer operational Tu-22M3s mean fewer supersonic missiles shrieking toward Kyiv’s transformer yards. Each Kh-101 not launched is an interceptor saved for the next volley, and every bomber grounded eases pressure on Patriot and NASAMS magazines valued in the millions per intercept. Ukrainian engineers are already stacking modular anti-drone paddocks around grid nodes, while star-link-linked spotters feed Geran trajectories to mobile pursuit teams.
But none of this signals an imminent collapse of Russian capability. Shahed lines in Tatarstan can still churn toward five hundred units a day. But the trajectory alters. Each future missile volley must factor in the risk that a handful of lorries, parked undiscovered inside Russia, could torch the very launch aircraft required for the next night’s raid. Depth, once Moscow’s security blanket, is now a liability that stretches resources and frays nerves. That psychological overhang forces the Kremlin into a resource triage: guard rear-echelon runways or reinforce first-line trench systems? Fortify annular fences around bombers or boost production of T-62 turrets? Either choice leaves a gap somewhere else, and Kyiv’s strategic brain trust clearly intends to probe every new seam.