Operation Spiderweb: How Ukraine’s Daring Top Secret Drone Assault Unfolded

As few as five people knew about Ukraine’s audacious plans to attack thousands of miles into Russian territory as they were first formulated, suggested Ivan Stupak, a former officer in Ukraine’s SBU security service.

More than a year and a half later, Kyiv succeeded in carrying out what could be its most dramatic, highly coordinated drone assaults on Russia of the war.

Ukraine on Sunday hit 41 of Russia’s expensive, hard-to-replace warplanes in a meticulously timed operation across three different time zones, thousands of miles away from Ukrainian soil, officials said. Andriy Kovalenko, an official with Kyiv’s national security and defense council, said on Monday that 13 Russian aircraft had been “destroyed.”

The drones were smuggled across the border, placed in wooden containers with removable roofs fixed on trucks.

“At the right moment,” the SBU said, “the roofs of the houses were remotely opened.”

The drones zipped away toward their targets, the agency said, homing in on Russia’s nuclear-capable bombers and at least one of Moscow’s A-50 spy planes. Russia is thought to have just a handful of these surveillance aircraft left.

The drones left roughly $7 billion in damage in their wake, hitting more than a third of Moscow’s strategic cruise missile carriers, Kyiv said. Russia called the operation a “terrorist attack.”

To deliver this hefty bill to Moscow in the operation known as “Spiderweb,” information was tightly guarded. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, personally oversaw the operation, preparations shepherded by SBU chief, Lieutenant General Vasyl Malyuk.

“To pull off a complex special operation, security must be very strict,” said Frederik Mertens, a strategic analyst with the Dutch research organization, TNO.

“Not just within your own ranks, but especially when communicating about it with others,” he told Newsweek. “This must be measured against a ‘need to know’, both militarily and politically, but the less people know about it, the better, as chances of leaks grow exponentially with every party that is informed.”

Kyiv has publicly admitted to attacking four Russian airfields — the Olenya airbase in the Murmansk region of northwestern Russia, the Ivanovo airbase northeast of Moscow, Dyagilevo in the Ryazan region, and Belaya, a military facility 2,500 miles from Ukraine in Siberia.

Russia, in a statement, said Ukraine had attacked airfields in Murmansk, Irkutsk, Ivanovo and Ryazan, as well as a base in the far eastern Amur region, bordering China.

A spokesperson for the SBU declined to comment when approached about strikes on the Ukrainka air base, a long-range aviation hub in Amur.

Amur Regional Governor Vasily Orlov, said part of a truck had “caught fire” close to the village of Seryshevo, but denied the Ukrainka air base was targeted by drones. The Ukrainka base sits just outside of Seryshevo.

Each of the 117 drones used to attack Russia’s air bases on Sunday had its own operator, Zelensky said.

All those who helped Kyiv execute the Spiderweb operation were pulled out of Russia before the drones flew, the president added. The main base in Russian territory where the operation was masterminded was “directly next to” an FSB regional headquarters, Zelensky added.

Russia’s FSB domestic security agency is the main descendent of the Soviet-era KGB.

Russia’s government said “some of the participants in the terrorist attacks have been detained.”

The drone strikes came on the eve of fresh rounds of face-to-face talks between Russian and Ukrainian officials in Turkey. Initial discussions last month produced the largest prisoner swap of the war, but little shuffling toward a peace deal that U.S President Donald Trump vowed to broker.

The strikes on Russia help Ukraine “negotiate from a position of strength,” Oleksandr Merezhko, the head of Ukraine’s parliamentary foreign affairs committee, told Newsweek on Monday.

The White House was not told in advance of the drones zooming toward the airfields, CBS News reported, citing anonymous administration officials. Newsweek has reached out to the Pentagon and State Department via email.

Moscow had upped the intensity of its missile and drone strikes on Ukraine in recent weeks, drawing sharp rebuke from Trump, who is disinclined to overly criticize the Kremlin. Ukraine, meanwhile, has grappled with a chronic shortage of air defense systems, and the interceptor missiles they fire to shield key sites and the country’s population.

Ukraine’s air force said on Monday Russia had launched overnight strikes on several Ukrainian regions, including the Chernihiv region northeast of Kyiv, with 80 drones, three hard-to-intercept ballistic missiles and a cruise missile. A total of 52 drones were shot down or knocked off course by electronic warfare, the air force said.

Ukraine is anticipating a potent Russian response to the drone strikes on its airfields, Stupak told Newsweek, suggesting Moscow could opt to launch one of its experimental Oreshnik missiles.

Russia fired an Oreshnik missile for the first time at Ukraine in November 2024, striking the central city of Dnipro. Ukrainian authorities initially reported Russia had fired an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), while Moscow described the missile as a hypersonic, intermediate-range weapon.

The Pentagon said at the time the Oreshnik, or “hazel tree,” was based on the design of Moscow’s RS-26 Rubezh ICBM, and the U.S. was notified “briefly before the launch through nuclear risk reduction channels.”