A series of explosions at Air bases at the bottom of Russia On June 1, 2025, came as a brutal awakening to Moscow military strategists. The Ukrainian strike at the heart of Russia’s strategic bombing capacity could also Use the traditional War rules: It offers smaller soldiers a plan to counter the capacity of a larger nation to launch air strikes at the bottom of the front lines.
Ukraine Spider Web Operation Implied 117 remote control drones which were introduced as a smuggling in Russia over an 18 -month period and launched to planes parked by operators for miles.
The raid destroys or degraded more than 40 Tu-95, Tu-16 and Tu-22 M3 Strategic BombersAs well as an A-50 Airborne-Aurly Warning plane, according to kyiv officials. That would represent About a third long -range striking fleet of Russia and about $ 7 billion in equipment. Even if satellite imagery will finally parent these figures, the damage scale is difficult to miss.
The logic behind the strike is even more difficult to ignore.
Traditional modern military campaigns revolve around depth. The countries at war are trying to build a safe combat power “rear area– Logistics centers which are often hundreds, even thousands of kilometers from the front line. These are the places where new military units are formed and long -range bombers, such as those destroyed in the Ukraine operation on June 1, resident.
Since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Kremlin has strongly supported its bombers base on deep arrival – more than 2,000 miles from the front in Ukraine. He twinned this tactic with the launch of waves of Shahed attack drones designed by Iran To keep Ukrainian cities under a night threat.
Russian victory theory is brutally simple: coercive air power. If missiles and one -way drones come across kyiv quite often, civil morale in Ukraine will crack, even if the advance of Russian land forces will get bogged down on the front line.
For Kyiv military planners, the destruction of launch platforms undermines this theory well at a lower cost than the only other alternative: to intercept each cruise missile in flight, which to date has reached a 80% success rate But is strongly based on the equipment offered by the west to come.
Aerodrome vulnerability
Aerodrome have always been Critical targets in modern war, logic being that the bombers and anchored fighters are more vulnerable and easier to strike.
In the North African desert during the Second World War, the United Kingdom Special air service Jeep raids used and explosives with delayed action to eliminate around 367 enemy planes spread across North Africa – firepower Luftwaffe has never regenerated. That same year, German paratroopers Seized the landing track on Crete, refusing to the British Royal Air Force an advanced base and based an entire campaign on the island.
A Generation later in VietnamViet Cong and the assault teams of the North Vietnamese army armed with accusations of sacoche and mortars have repeatedly penetrated us from the perimeters of Phan Rang, Da Nang and Bien Hoa, burning combatants on the ramp and forcing the diversion of thousands of American security soldiers.
The underlying game book to hit planes on the ground remains effective because it requires cascade costs. Each track skates and each inverted bomber obliges the military blow to pay money in means of frustrating such attacks, whether it is hardened shelters or the dispersion of squadrons in several bases. Such air attacks also divert fighters from the front lines to serve as guards.
A new era of the drone war
In Operation Spider Web, Ukraine sought to repeat this strategy while shooting the surprise to realize Psychological shock and dislocation.
But the Ukrainian operation draws from a unique aspect of the 21st century of war.
The advent of the war of unmanned drones has seen more and more military practitioners speak of “Littoral air– The soldiers speak of the edge of the atmosphere which is above the ground forces still under the altitude where the combatants and high-performance bombers traditionally wander.
Drones thrive in this region, where they bypass most infantry weapons and fly too low for traditional defenses guided by radar in order to follow reliably, despite the capacity to wire targets like fuel trucks or strategic bombers.
By smuggling small launch drones teams a few kilometers from each track, Kyiv created pop-up launchers deeply in Russia and was able to take the enemy off guard and not prepared.
The economic advantages of Ukraine’s approach are austere. While a drone, a lithium battery and a warhead cost much less than $ 3,000, a Russian Tu-160 Bomber costs $ 250 million in the region.
The impact on Russia
The Ukraine Spider Web operation will have immediate and costly consequences for Russia, even if the strikes end up being less destructive than kyiv currently claims.
Surviving bombers will have to be moved. The protection of the basics against repeated attacks will mean erecting earth coverings, installing 30 mm cannons guided by radar and electronic fogs to cover possible attack vectors. It all costs money. More importantly, the operation will divert the soldiers and trained technicians who could otherwise turn to the front line in support of the upcoming summer offensive.
The raid also strikes a hole in Russia Nuclear weapons capacities.
Losing to a dozen Tu-95 and Tu-160 planes, which would be as nuclear bombers, would be strategically embarrassing and could encourage the Kremlin to rethink the frequency of the frequency of long -range air patrols.
Beyond physical and financial damage to the Russian fleet, Ukraine’s operation is also accompanied by a powerful psychological effect. He points out that Ukraine, more than three years after a war to grind morale, is able to launch deeply sophisticated operations in Russian territory.
Ukraine’s security service operation unfolded in patient granular stages: 18 months of smuggling drones and batteries dismantled through the borders inside the harmless cargo, weeks of quietly rejoice and meticulous screening of the camera angles to ensure that launch trucks would be indistinguishable in normal warehouse traffic on commercial satellite images.
The operators led these trucks to presurvey shooting points, then deployed the drones up to trees.
Given that each of the drones was a one -way weapon, a dozen pilots could work in parallel near the launch or remote site, the direct video direction feeds on parked bombers. Strike videos Suggest several almost simultaneous impacts in large track bands – enough to overwhelm any ad hoc response from small weapons of the perimeter guards.
A new front line?
For Ukraine, the episode demonstrates a reproducible method to hit deep and well defended assets. The same manual can, in principle, be adapted to missile storage deposits and, more importantly, to factories through mass producers’ attack drones in Russia.
Kyiv had to find a way to counter the drone waves And ballistic missile strikes that have produced more damage than Russian cruise missiles. The Center for Strategic and International ‘Studies’ Firepower Strike Tracker has shown that Shaheds are now the most frequent and most profitable Air weapon in the Russian countryside.
But the implications of the Spider Web operation go far beyond the Russian-Ukraine conflict by knowing the old idea that the rear areas are safe. Compared drones cheap, launched from the interior of the territory of Russia, destroyed the planes that cost billions of dollars and underlie Moscow’s long reach and nuclear signaling. It is a strategy that what can be easily reproduced by other attackers against other countries.
Anyone who can smuggle, hiding and piloting small drones can sabotage the ability of an opponent to generate air attacks.
The air forces based on large fixed bases must harden, disperse or accept that their track is a new front line.
This article is republished from The conversationAn independent non -profit press organization bringing you facts and a confidence analysis to help you give meaning to our complex world. It was written by: Benjamin Jensen,, American School of International Service
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Benjamin Jensen does not work, consult, does not have or does not receive funding from a company or an organization which would benefit from this article and has not revealed any relevant affiliation beyond their academic appointment.
