Inside Operation Spiderweb: Ukraine’s drone triumph is a blow against Russia that will spook friend and foe alike
When the lorry stopped close to the Belaya airfield at the weekend, and the wooden sheds onboard opened their roofs to release a swarm of quadcopters, warfare changed for ever.
The success of Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb, which destroyed more than 40 Russian bombers, will have elicited both delight and terror in the hearts of Kyiv’s allies.
The homegrown operation to hide drones in false compartments within prefabricated sheds and unleash them simultaneously many thousands of miles apart – and many thousands of miles behind enemy lines – has clipped the wings of Vladimir Putin’s strategic air operations.
Ukraine claims that its SBU intelligence service destroyed 41 Russian aircraft, causing $7bn (£5bn) worth of damage to long-range bombers that carried the cruise missiles Putin has been using against Ukraine.
Videos of the attack on Belaya show aircraft bursting into flames, as drones, which may have been autonomous or semi-autonomous, dived onto planes sitting on the tarmac in a raid as daring as the first successful Special Air Service attack on the Italian airfield at Tamet, Libya, in 1941, which destroyed 24 aircraft.
But, aside from a handful of agents who were involved in the 18 months of preparation it took to bring Operation Spiderweb to its conclusion, no commandos had to risk their lives to blow up the Tu-95 and Tu-22M3 bombers and the Russian A-50 early warning spy plane. Kyiv said that the 41 aircraft attacked represented 34 per cent of the Kremlin’s long-range bomber capability.
The operation involved assembling sheds with hidden compartments for the nests of drones, sneaking them onto lorries, and, in the case of the Belaya assault, driving the trucks more than 4,000km across the Russian Federation.
The vehicles were then parked, and the roofs of the sheds were opened by remote control to release the drones, which were flown to their targets using the Russian mobile telephone network.
Given that 117 drones were used in the four attacks, it is unlikely they were all flown by human pilots, so it seems probable that a form of artificial intelligence was used in the drone targeting system – although no Ukrainian officials have said as much.
Operation Spiderweb came after Russia drastically increased its air campaign against Ukraine using primitive Iranian-designed long-range Shahed drones as well as ballistic and cruise missiles.
The airfields hit were Belaya in Irkutsk oblast, Siberia; Olenya in Murmansk oblast, in Russia’s extreme northwest; Dyagilevo in Ryazan oblast, in the west; and Ivanovo, within the western Ivanovo oblast.
In conventional military doctrine, the destruction of so many strategic aircraft would be conceived as part of a multimillion-dollar operation using long-range missiles, probably involving an aircraft carrier, and risking the lives of pilots – similar to what the US and UK have been doing in recent attacks against the Houthis in Yemen.
But Ukraine has achieved a dramatic strategic impact using guile and cheaply produced quadcopters similar to those that can be bought on any high street in Britain.
“Putin has realised that Russia is not winning the war, and that Ukraine is capable of such ingenious military operations. In fact, Ukraine has debunked the myth that it “doesn’t have the cards”, said Olekandr Morezkho, chair of Ukraine’s parliamentary foreign affairs committee.
