President Volodymyr Zelensky did have some cards up his sleeve. Yesterday's operation, the boldest and deadliest in the three and a half years of the Russian invasion in Ukraine, will be studied in history books and military academies. Once again, at a moment when the Russians boasted of initiative in advancing on the front line, Kiev has dealt a severe blow to its opponent in the rear.
Severe due to the target achieved, a good number of the scarce and irreplaceable Russian strategic bombers, and severe also due to the humiliation of doing it with 430 euro drones, 4,600 kilometers away from the contact line at the furthest attacked location, in at least four coordinated attacks without the Russian secret service, heir to the KGB, detecting them. Not even the alarms sounded, nor did the radars spot anything unusual.
It demonstrates that Ukraine can not only eliminate high-value Russian assets within Russia, as it has done with some of its generals, but also do so at their bases. Moscow's military bloggers speak of the "Russian Pearl Harbor". The bases of Belaya, Diagilevo, Olenya, and Ivanovo were ablaze, with explosions also heard in places like the Voskresensk military airfield. Satellite images will be needed to determine the real extent of the attack, but from what can already be analyzed from the published videos, it is one of the greatest intelligence operations of all time, on par with Mossad's tracking devices exploding in the pockets of Hezbollah members.
We are talking about an unprecedented aerial victory and the largest attack ever carried out against Russia's strategic armed forces. To suddenly eliminate perhaps dozens (40 according to some sources) of these bombers without risking a single aircraft and doing it on the ground with cheap drones is a humiliation surpassing the sinking of the cruiser Moskva, the destruction of the Kersh bridge, or the invasion of the Russian region of Kursk. The timing is not coincidental either: this week, the delegations of Ukraine and Russia (which has refused three times to establish a ceasefire that would have prevented this attack) are meeting again for a new round of peace negotiations. This time, the Kremlin's envoys will sit down after having to digest this defeat.
What makes these bombers so valuable? They are Soviet Cold War aircraft Tupolev Tu22 (Backfire) and Tu95 (Bear) with a combination of strategic versatility, long-range capability, massive payload, and lack of viable replacements. Both can attack strategic targets far from Russian territory but new models cannot be manufactured anymore, as the components came from all over the USSR, including Ukraine, and obtaining them today is impossible for Russia. Russian aviation channels claim that 27 Tu95s have been destroyed out of around 40 operational ones. We will see if this is true, but what can already be seen in the published videos represents a lethal blow to their strategic aviation, which has lost a significant number of its aircraft (each costing around 30 million euros) in less than 24 hours.
Officially named operation Spiderweb, the Ukrainian SBU (Security Service of Ukraine) has released details: a year and a half of preparation, drones acquired by Ukraine but sent to Russia, wooden containers with retractable roofs and remote-controlled openings, and a truck approaching the base with these containers, acting as a Trojan horse, although it has not been explained yet how and who precisely guided these drones towards the bombers resting on the runway, which are usually used, week in and week out, to attack Ukrainian cities. In one of the few published photographs, General Vasil Maliuk, head of the SBU, analyzes the blueprints of a base and the locations where pilots planned their bombings.
It seems that even the truck drivers did not know what they were transporting. After the aircraft took off, the trucks exploded with some cargo activated remotely. Considering that these drones have only a few kilometers of autonomy, does it mean that Ukrainian pilots were nearby? If they were not nearby, does it mean that from Ukraine they have found a way to remotely pilot them thousands of kilometers away? Did the mother trucks have satellite connection? Or something even more disruptive: were the drones trained with artificial intelligence to detect and attack pre-scanned targets, such as the Tu95s? The Ukrainian government reported that the personnel involved in the operation in Russia have already been successfully evacuated.
In other words, Vladimir Putin has seen one of his most important resources for terrorizing his enemies and maintaining deterrence, one of the three prongs of his nuclear triad, greatly diminished. It was done by Ukraine, a country without nuclear weapons, without a navy, and with outdated aviation, which the Kremlin was planning to conquer in a Special Military Operation of three days.