Ukraine’s drone attacks on airfields deep inside Russia on Sunday was a strategic and symbolic blow that military analysts said was designed to slow Moscow’s relentless bombing campaign and to demonstrate that Kyiv can still raise the cost of war for the Kremlin.
After more than a year of planning, Ukraine was able to plant drones on Russian soil, just miles away from military bases. Then in a coordinated operation on Sunday, Ukrainian drones attacked five different regions in Russia. Some were launched from containers attached to semis, their flights captured on videos verified by The New York Times. Plumes of smoke billowed above one base. At another, strategic bombers were hit.
Although the full extent of the damage is unknown, the attacks, known as Operation Spider’s Web, showed how Ukraine is adapting and evolving in the face of a larger military with deeper resources. Using drones, Kyiv has been able to push Russia out of much of the Black Sea, limit its gains on the front lines despite Ukraine’s own troop shortages, and hamper Russia’s ability to amass large concentrations of forces for major offensives.
The operation on Sunday, along with extensive bombardments on Ukrainian cities by Moscow, also complicate ongoing efforts for diplomacy. Delegations from both sides met Monday for peace talks in Istanbul, with no breakthrough on a cease-fire announced.
After the attacks, there were calls for a swift response across Russian media, and Ukrainians braced for retaliation even as they celebrated an operation that gave their beleaguered nation a much needed morale boost.
Both sides have put out assessments that were not immediately verifiable.
Ukraine said that 117 drones were used in the attacks, known as Operation Spider’s Web, and that 41 Russian aircraft were destroyed or damaged.
Russian military bloggers played down the damage; the Russian Ministry of Defense said that Ukraine had attacked airfields in the Murmansk, Irkutsk, Ivanovo, Ryazan and Amur regions, and that Moscow had thwarted attacks at three of the bases.
The New York Times verified videos that showed successful strikes at Olenya Air Base in the Murmansk region and Belaya Air Base in the Irkutsk region, and damage to at least five aircraft, four of them strategic bombers.
Even with limited information, military analysts 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.
“This is a stunning success for Ukraine’s special services,” said Justin Bronk, 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.
Mick Ryan, a retired Australian general and fellow at the Lowy Institute, a Sydney-based research group, said that “the proliferation of drones, open-source sensors and digital command and control systems means that long-range strike is now a commodity available to almost every nation state, and nonstate actor, with a few million dollars and the desire to reach out and strike their adversary.”
Mr. Zelensky, in comments on Monday at a NATO meeting of Baltic and Nordic countries, said the operation showed Russia that it is also subject to serious losses, and “that is what will push it toward diplomacy.”
However, Mr. Ryan and other analysts cautioned that despite the nature of the attacks, they are unlikely to alter the political calculus of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who remains bent on achieving his war aims.
The operation is part of an evolving campaign
Behind Ukraine’s operation was a basic goal: Kill the archer instead of trying to stop the arrows.
It is part of an ever-evolving campaign by Ukraine to play offense rather than defense, by targeting Russian missile platforms on land, air and sea.
In December 2022, nine months into the war, Ukraine executed one of its first ambitious attacks on Russian territory, targeting two airfields hundreds of miles inside the country using long-range drones.
As the drone strikes expanded over the years, Russia adapted, building protective structures around fuel depots at the bases, bringing in more air defense assets and routinely repositioning its fleet.
Ukraine needed a new plan if it hoped to inflict serious damage.
They came up with “Operation Spider’s Web,” which Ukrainian officials said was overseen personally by Mr. Zelensky and managed directly by the head of the S.B.U., Vasyl Malyuk. The idea was to bring small, first-person-view, or FPV, drones close enough to the airfields to render traditional air defenses systems useless.
The Ukrainians on Monday offered an unusually detailed public account of the operation.
Over the course of many months, they said, dozens of FPV drones were transported into Russia; the scale of the operation could not be independently verified. Mr. Zelensky claimed they set up a base of operations at a warehouse close to a regional headquarters of Russia’s domestic intelligence agency, known as the F.S.B.
Once the drones were smuggled into Russia, they were packed onto pallets inside wooden transport containers with remote-controlled lids and then loaded onto trucks, the S.B.U. statement said.
There was no indication that the drivers of the trucks knew what they were hauling, Ukrainian officials said.
Mr. Zelensky said that all of the Ukrainian agents involved in the operation had made it safely out of Russia before the operation commenced, a claim that could not be independently verified. The Russian government, in a statement on Sunday, said that some of those involved in the attack had been detained.
Ukraine planted drones inside Russia
One video verified by The Times shows a drone approaching Belaya air base before a strike.
Other verified footage shows two drones launched from containers mounted on the back of a semi-truck less than four miles away. They fly in the direction of large smoke plumes now rising from the base. Footage recorded shortly afterward shows the same containers ablaze, their tops beside them on the ground.
Ukrainian officials said in their account that the transport crates were rigged to self-destruct after the drones were released.
Another video verified by the Times shows drones flying less than four miles from the Olenya air base. The man recording it suggests that the drones had been launched from a truck parked just down the road.
The Times could not confirm that the drones in the various videos were part of the assault.
In its assessment, Ukraine said the 41 planes accounted for 34 percent of the strategic cruise-missile carriers at air bases across three time zones. The Times was able to verify that four TU-95 bombers and one Antonov cargo plane were hit.
Russian military bloggers claimed the Ukrainian damage estimates were inflated.
One influential Russian military blogger, Rybar, run by Mikhail Zvinchuk, put the number of damaged Russian aircraft at 13, including up to 12 strategic bombers. Another one, Fighterbomber, believed to be run by Capt. Ilya Tumanov of the Russian Army, said in a post on Monday that only “a handful” of strategic aircraft were hit, but even such a loss was “huge for a country that doesn’t make them.”
Col. Markus Reisner, a historian and officer in the Austrian Armed Forces, said that the best Western estimates suggest that Russia had slightly over 60 active Tu-95s and around 20 Tu-160 bombers. “Replacing losses will be very challenging,” he said.
Ben Hodges, a retired general who commanded the U.S. Army Europe, said the available evidence suggests that the operation put a “real dent” in Russia’s ability to launch large salvos of cruise missiles.
“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 said.
The attack raises new risks
Mr. Zelensky said the attack was not only designed to undercut Russia’s ability to bombard Ukrainian cities but to increase pressure on the Kremlin to accept an unconditional cease-fire.
“It was the Russians who chose to continue the war — even under conditions where the entire world is calling for an end to the killing,” he said in his nightly address to the nation. “And pressure is truly needed — pressure on Russia that should bring it back to reality.”
There was no indication that the attack had changed the Kremlin’s belief that it holds an advantage over Ukraine, counting on the weakening resolve of Kyiv’s allies and its ability to grind down vastly outnumbered Ukrainian forces.
There was also the risk that Ukraine’s allies would be rattled by the attack and the general pattern of escalation in recent weeks as Russia steps up its own bombardments.
But Mr. Ryan said the strikes also show how Ukraine is evolving so that it is less reliant on U.S. intelligence in the event of “shut offs” like earlier this year. The operation, he said, demonstrates “how success in war is biased toward those who learn and adapt the quickest.”
Ivan Nechepurenko contributed reporting from Tblisi, Georgia, and Steven Erlanger from Berlin.
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.
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