{"id":152135,"date":"2025-06-02T12:57:09","date_gmt":"2025-06-02T12:57:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/152135\/"},"modified":"2025-06-02T12:57:09","modified_gmt":"2025-06-02T12:57:09","slug":"how-will-ukraines-attack-on-russian-bombers-affect-the-war-russia-ukraine-war-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/152135\/","title":{"rendered":"How will Ukraine\u2019s attack on Russian bombers affect the war? | Russia-Ukraine war News"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kyiv, Ukraine \u2013<\/strong> Any description of Ukraine\u2019s attacks<\/a> on Russia\u2019s fleet of strategic bombers could leave one scrambling for superlatives.<\/p>\n

Forty-one planes \u2013 including supersonic Tu-22M long-range bombers, Tu-95 flying fortresses and A-50 early warning warplanes \u2013 were hit and damaged on Sunday on four airfields, including ones in the Arctic and Siberia, Ukrainian authorities and intelligence said.<\/p>\n

Moscow did not comment on the damage to the planes but confirmed that the airfields were hit by \u201cUkrainian terrorist attacks\u201d.<\/p>\n

Videos posted by the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), which planned and carried out the operation, which was called The Spiderweb, showed only a handful of planes being hit.<\/p>\n

The strategic bombers have been used to launch ballistic and cruise missiles from Russian airspace to hit targets across Ukraine, causing wide scale damage and casualties.<\/p>\n

The bomber fleet is one-third of Moscow\u2019s \u201cnuclear triad\u201d, which also consists of nuclear missiles and missile-carrying warships.<\/p>\n

According to some observers, the attack shattered Russia\u2019s image of a nuclear superpower with a global reach.<\/p>\n

The attack inadvertently \u201chelped the West because it targeted [Russia\u2019s] nuclear potential\u201d, Lieutenant General Ihor Romanenko, former deputy head of the Ukrainian military\u2019s general staff, told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n

While the assault decreases Russia\u2019s potential to launch missiles on Ukraine, it will not affect the grinding ground hostilities along the crescent-shaped, 1,200km (745-mile) front line, he said.<\/p>\n

\"INTERACTIVE-WHO(Al Jazeera)<\/p>\n

Romanenko compared The Spiderweb\u2019s scope and inventiveness to a string of 2023 Ukrainian attacks against Russia\u2019s Black Sea fleet that was mostly concentrated in annexed Crimea.<\/p>\n

Although Ukraine\u2019s navy consisted of a handful of small, decades-old warships that fit into a football field-sized harbour, Kyiv reinvented naval warfare by hitting and drowning Russian warships and submarines with missiles and air and sea drones.<\/p>\n

Moscow hastily relocated the decimated Black Sea fleet eastwards to the port of Novorossiysk and no longer uses it to intercept Ukrainian civilian vessels loaded with grain and steel.<\/p>\n

The Spiderweb caught Russia\u2019s military strategists off-guard because they had designed air defences to thwart attacks by missiles or heavier, long-range strike drones.<\/p>\n

Instead, the SBU used 117 toy-like first-person-view (FPV) drones, each costing just hundreds of dollars, that were hidden in wooden crates loaded onto trucks, it said.<\/p>\n

Their unsuspecting drivers took them right next to the airfields \u2013 and were shocked to see them fly out and cause the damage that amounted to $7bn, the SBU said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe driver is running around in panic,\u201d said a Russian man who filmed thick black smoke rising from the Olenegorsk airbase in Russia\u2019s Arctic region of Murmansk, which borders Norway.<\/p>\n

Other videos released by the SBU were filmed by drones as they were hitting the planes, causing thundering explosions and sky-high plumes of black smoke.<\/p>\n

Russia\u2019s air defence systems guarding the airfields were not designed to detect and hit the tiny FPV drones while radio jamming equipment that could have caused them to stray off course wasn\u2019t on or malfunctioned.<\/p>\n

The SBU added a humiliating detail \u2013 The Spiderweb\u2019s command centre was located in an undisclosed location in Russia near an office of the Federal Security Service (FSB), Moscow\u2019s main intelligence agency, which Russian President Vladimir Putin once headed.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a slap on the face for Russia, for FSB, for Putin,\u201d Romanenko said.<\/p>\n

However, Kyiv didn\u2019t specifically target the pillar of Russia\u2019s nuclear triad.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey are destroying Russian strategic aviation not because it\u2019s capable of carrying missiles with nuclear warheads but because of its use to launch \u2026 nonnuclear [missiles],\u201d Nikolay Mitrokhin, a researcher with Germany\u2019s Bremen University, told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n

The operation, which took 18 months to plan and execute, damaged a third of Russia\u2019s strategic bomber fleet, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is our most far-reaching operation. Ukraine\u2019s actions will definitely be in history textbooks,\u201d he wrote on Telegram late on Sunday. \u201cWe\u2019re doing everything to make Russia feel the necessity to end this war.\u201d<\/p>\n

The SBU used artificial intelligence algorithms to train the drones to recognise Soviet-era aircraft by using the planes displayed at an aviation museum in central Ukraine, the Clash Report military blogger said on Monday.<\/p>\n

\u2018The very logic of the negotiations process won\u2019t change\u2019<\/p>\n

The attack took place a day before Ukrainian and Russian diplomats convened in Istanbul<\/a> to resume long-stalled peace talks.<\/p>\n

But it will not affect the \u201clogic\u201d of the negotiations, a Kyiv-based political analyst said.<\/p>\n

\u201cEmotionally, psychologically and politically, the operation strengthens the positions of Ukrainian negotiators,\u201d Volodymyr Fesenko, head of the Penta think tank, told Al Jazeera. \u201cBut the very logic of the negotiations process won\u2019t change.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBoth sides will consider [US President] Donald Trump an arbiter, and whoever is first to leave the talks loses, ruins its negotiation positions with the United States,\u201d Fesenko said.<\/p>\n

Once again, the talks will likely show that the sides are not ready to settle as Russia is hoping to carve out more Ukrainian territory for itself and Ukraine is not going to throw in the towel.<\/p>\n

\u201cRussia wants to finish off Ukraine, and we\u2019re showing that we will resist, we won\u2019t give up, won\u2019t capitulate,\u201d Fesenko said.<\/p>\n

By Monday, analysts using satellite imagery confirmed that 13 planes \u2013 eight Tu-95s, four Tu-22Ms and one An-12 \u2013 have been destroyed or damaged.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat a remarkable success in a well-executed operation,\u201d Chris Biggers, a military analyst based in Washington, DC, wrote on X next to a map showing the destruction of eight planes at the Belaya airbase in the Irkutsk region in southeastern Siberia.<\/p>\n

Five more planes have been destroyed at the Murmansk base, according to Oko Hora, a group of Ukrainian analysts.<\/p>\n

The Spiderweb targeted three more airfields, two in western regions and one near Russia\u2019s Pacific coast, according to a photo that the SBU posted showing its leader, Vasyl Malyuk, looking at a map of the strikes.<\/p>\n

But so far, no damage to the airfields or the planes on them has been reported.<\/p>\n

Russia is likely to respond to The Spiderweb with more massive drone and missile attacks on civilian sites.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m afraid they\u2019ll use Oreshnik<\/a> again,\u201d Fesenko said, referring to Russia\u2019s most advanced ballistic missile, which can speed up to 12,300 kilometres per hour (7,610 miles per hour), or 10 times the speed of sound, and was used in November to strike a plant in eastern Ukraine.<\/p>\n

\"LocalLocal resident Lyudmila Tsinkush leaves her house that was damaged in a Russian drone strike, in Zaporizhzhia on June 1, 2025 [Thomas Peter\/Reuters]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kyiv, Ukraine \u2013 Any description of Ukraine\u2019s attacks on Russia\u2019s fleet of strategic bombers could leave one scrambling…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":152136,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7654],"tags":[2000,299,12,332,7661,657],"class_list":{"0":"post-152135","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ukraine","8":"tag-eu","9":"tag-europe","10":"tag-news","11":"tag-russia","12":"tag-russia-ukraine-war","13":"tag-ukraine"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114613888401047520","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152135"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152135\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/152136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}