Three days after Ukraine launched its most complex attack against Russia since the full-scale war began, details of how it was carried out and the damage it caused to Russia’s strategic bomber fleet are still emerging.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy described the operation, dubbed “Spider’s Web”, as “absolutely brilliant”, although the extent of Russian military losses remains unclear. On Wednesday, he said that of the 41 planes damaged, half cannot be repaired.
The attacks targeted at least four Russian military air bases, the furthest of which from Ukraine is the Belaya base in the Siberian region of Irkutsk, around 4,850 km (3,000 miles) from Kyiv.
According to Ukrainian authorities, the operation involved 117 drones that were smuggled into Russia: they were concealed beneath the retractable roofs of wooden sheds, transported to locations close to military bases and piloted remotely to hit strategic, nuclear-capable bombers. In some cases, artificial intelligence was used to guide the drones to their target.
Russian officials said on Wednesday that military options were “on the table” for its response to Ukrainian attacks deep inside Russia and accused the West of being involved in them.
Ukraine’s main offensive threat in the war so far has been its long-range drones, which have struck targets deep inside Russia, including oil refineries, military bases and arms depots.
Yet, despite some technological advances and increased production, the drones have a maximum range well short of 5,000 km and can be detected as they fly into Russian air space, meaning air defences down many of them.
The June 1 operation, including the attack on the Belaya air base, relied on a different threat: relatively small “kamikaze” drones launched from locations just a few kilometres away.
The element of surprise was vital, denying Russia’s military the time to move mobile air defences into place or block the drones with electronic jamming.
How the attack unfolded
According to Ukraine’s security service, the SBU, the drones were smuggled into Russia by its operatives and concealed within the roof space of wooden sheds.
An image shared by Ukrainian authorities showed around 20 drones, each with four propellors, placed in wooden cavities below a roof.
Video footage verified by Reuters shows that the roof of at least one of the sheds had been removed to release the attack drones at the designated place and time.
On the day of the strike, a hidden mechanism retracted the trucks’ roofs, revealing drone launch platforms inside.
Russian authorities have given few details about the attack.
The Defence Ministry said Ukraine had launched drone strikes targeting military airfields in Murmansk, Irkutsk, Ivanovo, Ryazan, and Amur regions. Air defences repelled the assaults in three regions, but not Murmansk and Irkutsk, it said, adding that in those places several aircraft caught fire.
The Kremlin said on Tuesday that an official investigation into the attack was underway.
The Baza news service, which has close contacts in Russian security and law enforcement, named the main suspect as a 37-year-old Ukrainian who had moved to the Russian region of Chelyabinsk in recent years. Reuters has not been able to verify independently Baza’s account.
According to Baza, which cited unnamed sources, the Ukrainian opened a transportation business in October last year and acquired several trucks in December. It was from these vehicles that the drones used in the attacks were launched, the news service said.
Baza said the drivers of four trucks, who apparently did not know about the nature of their cargoes, were told to drive to different destinations across Russia carrying wooden sheds.
When the trucks were close to their destinations, the drivers were given instructions over the phone where to stop. In one case, Baza reported, the drones began to fly out of the sheds the moment the truck was parked, and in another while the truck was still moving.
Neither Ukraine nor Russia has commented on accounts in the Russian media.
Based on images posted on social media, Reuters has established that the truck used in the attack on the Belaya base was parked along the P-255 highway at the time, some 7 km from the airfield.
A Ukrainian source with knowledge of the matter said the drones were piloted remotely via the Russian cellular telecommunications network.
The SBU said in a statement on Wednesday that during the operation, modern drone control technology was used in the operation combining autonomous artificial intelligence algorithms and manual intervention by the operator. Due to signal loss, some drones switched to performing the mission using artificial intelligence along a pre-planned route. When a drone approached and made contact with a specific target, its explosive was automatically triggered.
The SBU said the operatives involved were all back in Ukraine by the time the attacks began. President Zelenskiy said the Ukrainian agents worked across multiple Russian regions in an operation that was 18 months in the planning.
Damaged and destroyed
Satellite imagery after the attack on the Belaya base show that several strategic bombers — experts say between six and eight — were either destroyed or badly damaged there.
At Olenya, footage released by the SBU and verified by Reuters showed two burning bombers which appeared to be nuclear-capable Tu-95s and a third, also a Tu-95, being hit by a large explosion.
New SBU drone footage released on Wednesday showed drones landing on the dome antennae of two A-50 military spy planes, of which there are only a handful in Russia’s fleet. There was no video showing the drones detonate.
Reuters was able to independently verify the locations of all four air bases in the footage, including the Ivanovo airbase where the A-50s were stationed. The news agency could not independently verify what date the footage was filmed.
The SBU said in a statement that the struck aircraft included the A-50, the Tu-95 strategic bomber, Tu-22 supersonic jet bomber, Tu-160 strategic bomber, as well as the An-12 and Il-78 military cargo planes.
There was no immediate public response from Moscow to the SBU statement.
Fabian Hinz, research fellow for defence and military analysis at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), said the attack would prove costly to Russia, partly because the types of aircraft that were hit are mostly out of production.
“The Russians can find a billion here and there, but these aircraft are not produced anymore,” he said. “That’s actually probably much more serious than losing a billion dollars or a few billion dollars. So I think it was a very significant attack.”
Estimates of the number of aircraft struck vary, but some experts said that between 10 and 13 strategic bombers – Tu-95s and Tu-22s – were destroyed and others damaged, based on imagery from two of four bases targeted – in Irkutsk and Murmansk.
This is only a part of the total fleet, but it reduces the number of planes that Russia can use to carry out cruise missile attacks on Ukraine.
Hinz said that Russia could take measures to protect its air bases in the future, but this kind of operation using drones launched locally could be applied to many targets.
“You suddenly have this whole new world of opportunities for sabotage within a country,” he said. “And this is the most spectacular attack and probably the most impactful attack we’ve seen that has worked like that.”
U.S. President Donald Trump’s Ukraine envoy, Keith Kellogg, told Fox News that the damage to the bombers was less important than the psychological impact on Russia. He added that he was particularly concerned by unconfirmed reports of a Ukrainian attack on a naval base in northern Russia.
Source : https://www.reuters.com/graphics/UKRAINE-CRISIS/DRONES-RUSSIA/mypmjzayyvr/
