Operation Spiderweb—Ukraine’s dramatic and stunning drone attack on air bases deep inside Russia—illustrates several themes that have characterized the war ever since Russia launched its illegal invasion in 2022. It is an example of Ukraine’s resilience, creativity, and audacity, which are qualities that have surprised Moscow on more than one occasion. It showed the incompetence and complacency of the Russian national security and intelligence establishment, which failed to anticipate or detect Ukraine’s successful effort to smuggle more than 100 lethal drones and remote operators deep into Russian territory and close to air bases where strategic bombers were deployed. Russia’s battlefield performance has improved since the war’s early days, but its national security apparatus remains vulnerable.
However, the understandable satisfaction that many observers felt upon learning of Spiderweb also reflects some of the errors that have undermined efforts to develop an effective response to the Russian invasion. Brilliant tactical innovations cannot make up for asymmetries in forces or resolve and the absence of an effective overall strategy. Three years into the war, Kyiv and its backers still lack a convincing plan to thwart Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war aims and convince him to end the fighting. Putin’s resolve does not appear to have been shaken by this latest incident, and he was true to his word when he told U.S. President Donald Trump that his country was determined to retaliate.
More importantly, the tactical inventiveness of the Ukrainian attack should not blind us to its strategic irrelevance. Drone attacks are novel and have already altered how wars are and will be fought, but they are ultimately just another form of airpower. Even highly effective airstrikes rarely win wars on their own, though air power (including drones) can be a valuable part of ground force operations.
From a strategic perspective, the best study of these issues remains Robert Pape’s 1991 book Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War. Pape argued that air power could be used to punish civilians, place an enemy’s strategic assets at risk, decapitate enemy leadership, or deny the enemy the military capacity to achieve its war aims. His cases showed that the first three strategies rarely, if ever, persuade an enemy to quit (for instance, bombing civilians tends to make them support the war effort even more strongly) and that air power was most effective when used in conjunction with other military assets to defeat enemy forces and demonstrate to them that they would not be able to achieve their strategic objectives.
Seen in this light, the recent Ukrainian drone operation—as impressive as it was from a purely tactical standpoint—was essentially a sideshow. In this sense, it is not unlike Ukraine’s equally unexpected and initially successful incursion near Kursk, which also failed to alter the course of the war and has since been completely reversed. Destroying a dozen or more strategic bombers won’t really affect Russia’s ability to continue advancing in Ukraine or to launch additional missile and drone attacks against Ukrainian cities.
To be sure, the operation undoubtedly gave a positive jolt to Ukrainian morale, reinforced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s popularity, and is probably forcing Russia to devote resources to thwarting future operations of this kind. One might even hope that it has increased doubts within the Russian national security elite about the wisdom of the war and Putin’s management of it, but there is no evidence that his grip on power is eroding or that either elite or public opposition to the war is going to change his mind. It would be wonderful if this were to occur, but it is a thin reed on which to base one’s plans.
This situation leaves Ukraine and its supporters with the same conundrum they have faced since the war began: how to overcome a numerically larger opponent that regards Ukraine’s geopolitical alignment as an existential issue and whose minimum war aims include ensuring that it does not become a Western bulwark. Although Ukrainians have made extraordinary sacrifices to defend their country, none of their strategic partners—including former U.S. President Joe Biden—have been willing to put their own troops or territory at risk. Given this asymmetry, Kyiv and the West have instead hoped that a combination of Ukrainian grit, Western financial and material aid, and stiff economic sanctions on Russia would eventually convince Moscow to reverse course.
That hasn’t happened. At this point, it seems increasingly unlikely that it ever will. Ukraine’s successful offensives in the fall of 2022 didn’t turn the tide, and a subsequent counteroffensive during the summer of 2023—featuring new brigades equipped and trained by Ukraine’s Western backers—was a costly debacle. As noted earlier, the initially successful incursion toward Kursk did not alter the war’s trajectory or provide Kyiv with useful bargaining chips, and Russian troops have continued to advance slowly, albeit at a very high cost. Even Trump seems to be realizing that Putin has little incentive to end the war when events on the battlefield are mostly running in his favor.
Any hopes of ending the war must also contend with political forces that will make finding a mutually acceptable settlement especially difficult. Kyiv and Moscow barely trusted each other before the war; they have zero trust in each other now. Putin saw NATO’s presence near the Russian border as a mortal danger before the war began; the addition of Finland and Sweden, as well as the support that NATO has given Ukraine, has undoubtedly increased his concerns. At the same time, Russia’s actions have made its neighbors far more concerned about its future intentions and less willing to accommodate it. The security dilemma between Russia and the West is more intense now than it was before the fighting started, and that will make crafting a stable and mutually acceptable solution much harder. And let’s not forget the familiar sunk-cost fallacy: As one Russian soldier recently told the New York Times, “We’re all tired, we want to go home. But we want to take all of the regions, so that we don’t have to struggle for them in the future. Otherwise, have all the guys died in vain?” Such sentiments are undoubtedly present in Ukraine, as well.
At this point in the war, no one should be overly confident that there’s a right answer, and achieving a perfect outcome is too much to expect. But pinning hopes on new weapons or tactics, or on audacious but inherently limited operations like Spiderweb, is wishful thinking. Instead, continuing to provide Ukraine with the ability to inflict disproportionate losses on Russia, combined with a serious effort to imagine and negotiate future security arrangements for Central Europe that would both deter and reassure Moscow, is the only approach that might end the war and preserve what remains of Ukraine. This isn’t appeasement: It means being willing to negotiate security arrangements that both reduce Russia’s interest in undermining the status quo and convince it that trying to do so will fail.
Unfortunately, it is by no means obvious that Western leaders are sufficiently united, resolved, and imaginative to pursue this course, especially given the Trump administration’s erratic handling of this issue and its underlying hostility to many European governments. In the end, it is these political factors that will determine Ukraine’s fate, not the tactically impressive but strategically irrelevant efforts of its heroic defenders.
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