FPI / June 5, 2025
Geostrategy-Direct
By Richard Fisher
Eighteen months in the making, Ukraine’s operation “Spider’s Web” was a bold non-nuclear strike against Russia’s strategic nuclear forces that has not only re-written the rules of warfare but has opened an era of global-strike drone warfare.
But Ukraine achieved strategic strike distance; It attacked Belaya Air Base which is 2,500 kilometers from Ukraine.
This era could be curtailed by the rapid proliferation of counter unmanned aerial system (C-UAS) defenses but could also get worse with the incorporation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) with unmanned systems and the successful development of humanoid robots.
This time, Ukraine used simple non-nuclear components, hundreds of quad-rotor drones packed in container boxes, that were then stealthily deployed by large trucks — with the drivers not knowing their cargo — to locations close enough to Russian strategic force bases to conduct their strikes.
Conceptually, the Ukrainian operation was not completely novel.
It was previewed in the late 2000s by Russia’s Novator Corporation that devised the idea of packing cruise missiles in nondescript shipping containers, to be deployed by ships, trains and trucks.
This concept has since been adopted by Chinese and U.S. companies looking to “containerize” various weapons.
Ukraine simply updated this concept with the smaller and much more affordable plastic quad rotor drone, that since the beginning of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine has become the ubiquitous precision-personal tank, soldier and drone killing weapon of choice.
One Ukrainian innovation, however, has been to booby-trap its drone containers with explosives, with one Russian video showing how when entered by one person, that container then blew up, either killing or severely wounding one Russian.
But in addition, Ukraine claimed that its operation destroyed 41 Russian aircraft, including many as seven Tupolev Tu-95MS “Bear-H” nuclear cruise missile carrying bombers and four Tu-22M “Backfire-C” supersonic bombers, causing $7 billion in damage.
Bombed bases include Olenya Air Base on the Kola Peninsula, where Tu-95MS bombers have flown from to bomb Ukraine, and the Tu-22M base at Belaya Air Base in Siberia.
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