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"Spider's Web", 18 months of preparation for Ukraine's bold operation. Damage to Russia, 7 billion dollars!

2025-06-02 08:24:07Kosova&Bota SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX
"Spider's Web", 18 months of preparation for Ukraine's bold
Ukraine attack

It is difficult to overstate the courage, or even the ingenuity, that went into Ukraine's nationwide offensive against Russian air forces. We cannot verify Ukrainian claims that these attacks caused $7 billion (about £5.2 billion) worth of damage, but it is clear that "Operation Spider's Web" was, at the very least, a spectacular propaganda coup.

Ukrainians are already comparing it to the greatest military successes since the start of the full-scale occupation by Russia, including the sinking of the Black Sea Fleet flagship, the Moskva, and the bombing of the Kerch bridge in 2022, as well as the missile attack on the port of Sevastopol the following year.

According to details revealed to the media by Ukrainian military intelligence, the SBU, this latest operation is the most complex achievement to date.

In a mission that reportedly took 18 months to prepare, dozens of small drones were smuggled into Russian territory, hidden in special compartments inside cargo trucks, transported to at least four different locations, thousands of kilometers apart, and then remotely launched to nearby air bases.

“No other intelligence operation in the world has achieved anything like this,” defense analyst Serhii Kuzan told Ukrainian television. “These strategic bombers are capable of carrying out long-range strikes against us,” he added.

"There are only 120 of them and we hit 40 of them. That's an incredible number."

It is difficult to assess the real damage, but Ukrainian military blogger Oleksandr Kovalenko points out that even if the bombers and command and control aircraft were not completely destroyed, the impact is gigantic.

“The scale of the damage is such that the Russian military-industrial complex, in its current state, will hardly be able to recover them in the near future,” he writes on his Telegram channel.

"The strategic bombers involved – the Tu-95, Tu-22 and Tu-160 – are, according to him, no longer in production. Their repair will be difficult, their replacement impossible. The loss of the Tu-160, a supersonic aircraft, will be particularly felt," he writes. "Today, the Russian Air Force lost not just two of its rarest aircraft, but actually two 'unicorns' in the herd," he said.

Beyond the physical damage, which may or may not be as great as analysts are estimating, Operation "Spider Web" sends another critical message, not only to Russia, but also to Ukraine's Western allies.

My colleague, Svyatoslav Khomenko, who writes for the BBC’s Ukrainian service, recalls a recent meeting with a government official in Kiev. The official was frustrated: “The biggest problem,” he told Khomenko, “is that the Americans are convinced that we have already lost the war. And from that assumption, everything else follows.”

Ukrainian defense journalist Illia Ponomarenko put it another way in a post on X, referring to President Volodymyr Zelensky's infamous meeting with Donald Trump in the Oval Office: "This is what happens when a proud nation, under attack, doesn't listen to all those voices: 'Ukraine has only 6 months left.' 'You're out of cards.' 'Surrender for peace, Russia can't lose.'"

Even more poignant was a post by the magazine “Business Ukraine”, which proudly wrote: “It turns out that Ukraine has some cards in its hand after all. Today, Zelensky threw down the ‘Drone King’.”

This, then, is the message that Ukrainian delegates carry with them as they arrive in Istanbul for a new round of ceasefire talks with Kremlin representatives: Ukraine is still in the game.

“The Americans have started to act as if their role is to negotiate the most lenient terms of surrender for us,” government official Svyatoslav Khomenko told me. “And then they feel offended when we don’t thank them. But of course we don’t thank them, because we don’t believe we’ve lost.”

Despite Russia's slow but unstoppable advance on the battlefields of Donbas, Ukraine is showing Russia and the Trump administration that they should not underestimate Kiev's prospects so easily./BBC


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