Ukraine said it secretly planted a swarm of drones in Russia and then unleashed them in a surprise attack on Sunday, hitting airfields from eastern Siberia to Russia’s western border.
The strike set several Russian aircraft on fire, stunned the Kremlin and dealt a strategic and symbolic blow to Moscow’s relentless bombing campaign in Ukraine.
Russian officials said that there were no casualties and that other Ukrainian attacks had been repelled.
Here’s what to know about the operation.
What happened?
Russia’s Defense Ministry said on Sunday that Ukrainian drones had attacked airfields in five regions stretching across five time zones. Several aircraft caught fire in the regions of Murmansk, near the border with Norway, and Irkutsk, in eastern Siberia, the ministry said.
“Some participants of the terrorist attacks were detained,” it said.
Ukraine said that 117 drones were used in the attacks. An official in Ukraine’s security services, known as the S.B.U., said that dozens of aircraft had been damaged in the strikes. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive intelligence operation.
It was not immediately possible to independently confirm the Ukrainian claim or the details from Russia’s Defense Ministry.
The New York Times verified videos that showed successful strikes at Olenya air base in the Murmansk region and the Belaya air base in the Irkutsk region. It also verified damage to at least five aircraft — four of them strategic bombers.
What more did the Ukrainians say?
The Ukrainians said the plan was known as Operation Spider’s Web. Drones were planted across Russia, near military bases, and lay in wait until they were activated simultaneously.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said on social media Sunday that planning for the strike had begun a year and a half ago. He called the results of the assault “absolutely brilliant.”
Those involved in the attack, he added, were withdrawn from Russia before it took place.
On Monday, the Ukrainians offered more details publicly about the operation. Over many months, they said, dozens of drones were secretly transported into Russia on trucks. They had been packed onto pallets inside wooden containers with remote-controlled lids and then loaded onto the trucks, an S.B.U. statement said.
Ukrainian officials said the crates were rigged to self-destruct after the drones were released. There was no indication that the drivers of the trucks knew what they were hauling, Ukrainian officials said.
The Trump administration was not given advance notice of Sunday’s drone strikes in Russia on Sunday, administration officials said.
The scale and details of the operation could not be independently verified.
A video verified by The Times shows two drones being launched from containers mounted on the back of a semi-truck less than four miles from the Belaya air base. Both drones fly in the direction of large plumes of smoke rising from the base. Footage recorded shortly afterward shows the same containers ablaze.
Another video shows drones flying less than four miles from the Olenya air base. The person recording could be heard suggesting that the drones had been launched from a truck parked just down the road. The Times could not confirm that those drones had been part of the assaults.
How much damage did Russia’s bombers sustain?
Ukraine said 41 planes had been hit, or about one-third of the strategic cruise-missile carriers at Russian air bases across three time zones. The Times verified that four Tu-95 bombers and one Antonov cargo plane were hit.
Russian military bloggers said the Ukrainian damage estimates were inflated. One influential Russian military blogger, Rybar, put the number of damaged Russian aircraft at 13, including up to 12 strategic bombers.
American and European security officials said that battle damage assessments were still coming in as of Monday, but that it looked as if six TU-95 and four TU-22M long-range strategic bombers were destroyed, as well as A-50 warplanes, which are used to detect air defenses and guided missiles. Ukraine has been gunning for those warplanes since the start of the war because Russia uses them to strike Ukrainian cities.
Western estimates suggest that Russia had slightly more than 60 active Tu-95s and about 20 Tu-160 bombers, according to Col. Markus Reisner, a historian and an officer in the Austrian Armed Forces. “Replacing losses will be very challenging,” he said.
The Ukrainian operation appears to have put a “real dent” in Russia’s ability to launch large salvos of cruise missiles, said Ben Hodges, a retired general who commanded the U.S. Army Europe. “The surprise that they achieved will have a shock on the system as the Russians try to figure out how these trucks loaded with explosives got so deep inside of Russia,” he added.
Why are the strikes significant?
“This is a stunning success for Ukraine’s special services,” said Justin Bronk, a senior research fellow for air power and technology at the Royal United Services Institute in London.
“If even half the total claim of 41 aircraft damaged/destroyed is confirmed, it will have a significant impact on the capacity of the Russian Long Range Aviation force to keep up its regular large-scale cruise missile salvos against Ukrainian cities and infrastructure, whilst also maintaining their nuclear deterrence and signaling patrols against NATO and Japan,” he said in an email.
The attack in Irkutsk, on the Belaya air base, was also the first time that any place in Siberia had been attacked by Ukraine’s drones since the war began with Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.
The Olenya base in the Murmansk region, which also came under attack, is also one of Russia’s key strategic airfields, hosting nuclear-capable aircraft.
Ukraine had executed ambitious drone attacks on Russian territory before, but Russia had defended against them. In late 2022, Kyiv targeted two airfields hundreds of miles inside Russia using long-range drones. But Russia adapted to such strikes, building protective structures around depots at bases, bringing in more air-defense assets and routinely repositioning its fleet.
Ukraine — which has banked on expanding the use of domestically produced drones — turned to a new approach.
What did Ukraine hope to gain?
The idea behind Operation Spider’s Web was to transport small, first-person-view drones close enough to Russian airfields to render traditional air-defense systems useless, officials said.
The operation ranks as a signature event on par with the sinking of the Russian flagship Moskva early in the war and the maritime drone assaults that forced the Russian Navy to largely abandon the home port of the Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol, Crimea, which Moscow said in 2014 that it had “annexed.”
Although the full extent of the damage from Ukraine’s strikes on Sunday is unknown, the attacks showed that Kyiv was adapting and evolving in the face of a larger military with deeper resources.
The Ukrainian strikes came a day before Russia and Ukraine met in Istanbul for further peace talks. While Kyiv shared its peace terms with Moscow ahead of the meeting, Russia presented its terms only on Monday. The Ukrainian delegation said it would need a week to review Moscow’s proposal, delaying further discussion.
At a NATO meeting of Baltic and Nordic countries, Mr. Zelensky said on Monday that the operation showed Russia that it was also vulnerable to serious losses and “that is what will push it toward diplomacy.”
But analysts say the attacks are unlikely to alter the political calculus of Russia’s leader, President Vladimir V. Putin. There was no indication that the attack had changed the Kremlin’s belief that it holds an advantage over Ukraine, as it counts on the weakening resolve of some of Kyiv’s allies and its ability to grind down outnumbered Ukrainian troops.
Reporting was contributed by Helene Cooper, Julian E. Barnes, Eric Schmitt and Lara Jakes.
Maria Varenikova covers Ukraine and its war with Russia.
Marc Santora has been reporting from Ukraine since the beginning of the war with Russia. He was previously based in London as an international news editor focused on breaking news events and earlier the bureau chief for East and Central Europe, based in Warsaw. He has also reported extensively from Iraq and Africa.
Devon Lum is a reporter on the Visual Investigations team at The Times, specializing in open-source techniques and visual analysis.
Ephrat Livni is a reporter for The Times’s DealBook newsletter, based in Washington.
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