An astonishing raid deep inside Russia rewrites the rules of war

Mint

2 days ago

SHORTLY AFTER noon on June 1st, Russian social media began flashing, alerting the world to Ukraine's most audacious operation on Russian territory to date. In Irkutsk province in eastern Siberia, some 4,000km from Ukraine, locals posted footage of small quadcopter drones emerging from lorries and flying toward a nearby airfield, home to some of Russia's most important strategic bombers. 'I work at a tire shop," one wrote. 'A truck pulled in, and drones flew out of it." From an airbase near Murmansk, in Russia's far north, came similar stories: 'The driver's running around...drones are flying from his truck toward the base." Other alarmed posts soon followed from airbases in Ryazan and Ivanovo provinces, deep in central Russia.
Ukraine's main security agency, the SBU, has since claimed responsibility for the operation, which it has codenamed 'Spider Web". It said at least 41 Russian aircraft were destroyed or damaged across four airfields, including rare and extremely expensive A-50 early-warning planes (Russia's equivalent of the AWACS) and Tu-22M3 and Tu-95 strategic bombers. The agency also released footage in which its pugnacious chief, Vasily Maliuk, is heard commenting on the operation. 'Russian strategic bombers," he says in his recognisable growl, 'all burning delightfully."
The strike is one of the heaviest blows that Ukraine has landed on Russia in a war now well into its fourth year. Russia has relatively small numbers of strategic bombers—probably fewer than 90 operational Tu-22, Tu-95 and newer Tu-160s in total. The planes can carry nuclear weapons, but have been used to fire conventional cruise missiles against Ukrainian targets, as recently as last week. That has made them high-priority targets for Ukrainian military planners. Many of the aircraft are old and no longer produced—the last Tu-22M3s and Tu-95s were made more than 30 years ago—and their replacements, the Tu-160, are being manufactured at a glacial pace.
The fact that Ukraine was able to damage or destroy such a large number of Russia's most advanced aircraft deep inside the country reflects the development of its deep-strike programme, as well as the remarkable extent to which Ukraine's undercover operatives are now able to work inside Russia. Since the start of the Kremlin's all-out invasion, Ukraine's operations have expanded in range, ambition and sophistication. Western countries have provided some assistance to Ukraine's deep-strike programme—on May 28th Germany promised to finance Ukrainian long-range drones—but much of the technology and mission planning is indigenous.
Today's operation is likely to be ranked among the most important raiding actions in modern warfare. According to sources, the mission was 18 months in the making. Russia had been expecting attacks by larger fixed-wing drones at night and closer to the border with Ukraine. The Ukrainians reversed all three variables, launching small drones during the day, and doing so far from the front lines. Ukraine had launched drones from within Russia previously; the difference was the scale and combined nature of the operations.
Commentators close to the Ukrainian security services suggest that as many as 150 drones and 300 bombs had been smuggled into Russia for the operations. The quadcopters were apparently built into wooden cabins, loaded onto lorries and then released after the roofs of the cabins were remotely retracted. The drones used Russian mobile-telephone networks to relay their footage back to Ukraine, much of which was released by the gleeful Ukrainians. They also used elements of automated targeting, the accounts claim.
A Ukrainian intelligence source said it was unlikely that the drivers of the trucks knew what they were carrying. He compared this aspect of the operation to the 2022 attack on Kerch bridge, where a bomb concealed in a lorry destroyed part of the bridge linking Crimea with the mainland. 'These kinds of operations are very complex, with key players necessarily kept in the dark," he said. The source described the operation as a multi-stage chess move, with the Russians first encouraged to move more of their planes to particular bases by Ukrainian strikes on other ones. Three days before the attack, dozens of planes had moved to the Olenya airfield in Murmansk province, according to reports published at the time. It was precisely here that the most damage was done.
The operation casts a shadow over a new round of peace talks that is scheduled to start in Istanbul on June 2nd. Ukraine has been terrorised in recent months by Russia's own massive strikes, sometimes involving hundreds of drones: one that took place overnight beginning on May 31st apparently involved a record 472 drones, the Ukrainian authorities say. Kyiv had been looking for ways to demonstrate to Vladimir Putin, Russia's president, that there is a cost to continuing the war. But the question is whether this operation has moved the dial, or simply raised the stakes. Chatter on Russian patriotic social-media networks has called for a severe response, likening the moment to Pearl Harbour, Japan's attack on America's Pacific Fleet in 1941. A senior Ukrainian official acknowledged that the operation carried risks of turning Western partners away from Ukraine. 'The worry is that this is Sinop," he said, referring to Russia's strike on an Ottoman port in 1853 that ended up isolating the attacker on the world stage.
Western armed forces are watching closely. For many years they have concentrated their own aircraft at an ever smaller number of air bases, to save money, and have failed to invest in hardened hangars or shelters that could protect against drones and missiles. America's own strategic bombers are visible in public satellite imagery, sitting in the open. 'Imagine, on game-day," writes Tom Shugart of CNAS, a think-tank in Washington, 'containers at railyards, on Chinese-owned container ships in port or offshore, on trucks parked at random properties…spewing forth thousands of drones that sally forth and at least mission-kill the crown jewels of the [US Air Force]." That, he warns, would be 'entirely feasible".