How Ukraine Used Cheap Drones and a Lot of Ingenuity to Strike a Major Blow Against Russia

Operation Spider Web — an absolutely unprecedented event that they’ll be making movies about in the not too distant future.

It’s been a long time since we had some good news about the war in Ukraine, and on Sunday the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) delivered in the most spectacular way possible by taking out a significant number of Russia’s heavy bombers using a handful of cheap, disposable FPV drones.

Now there are two things you need to know about these bombers. Firstly, they’re the ones that Russia uses to regularly launch mass-missile attacks at Ukrainian cities.

Secondly, they do this in the most cowardly way possible. During one of the countless, regular mass missile strikes, these bombers never fly anywhere near Ukraine. They launch their missiles over the Caspian Sea, far out of range of Ukraine’s air defences.

And they take off and land at air bases far out of range of Ukraine’s own missiles (some drones can reach them but given their smaller warheads they’ve only had limited effect).

This has obviously presented Ukraine with a problem for a while now — how to stop Russia’s indiscriminate bombing of Ukraine’s cities?

The answer, it turns out, is with some cheap little drones and a lot of ingenuity.

Operation Spider Web — a year-and-a-half in the planning — saw 137 FPV drones equipped with small explosives smuggled into Russia and then hidden in the roofs of small wooden cabins.

These cabins were then transported across Russia on trucks. When the trucks stopped near four Russian air bases, the roofs of the cabins retracted and the drones flew out and headed towards the Russian bombers.

The full extent of the damage is not yet known, but the SBU claims to have hit more than 40 aircraft, disabling a third of Russia’s heavy bomber fleet, and inflicted $7 billion in damage.

And it’s the money involved that really show not only how incredible this operation was, but the dramatically changing face of modern warfare.

Each of these FPV drones costs only a few hundred dollars, and yet they’re being used to destroy Russian military equipment costing millions — a single Russian A-50 radar aircraft is estimated to be worth round $350 million.

And in a marvellous twist, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Sunday evening claimed the base of operations for Spider Web was located “directly next to FSB headquarters in one of their regions”.

Whether or not Spider Web succeeds in stopping Russian mass-missile attacks remains to be seen, but the positive psychological boost in Ukraine is badly needed right now.

“Christmas has come early this year”, one friend told me.

There is of course the question of how Russia will respond. They have plenty of ballistic missiles, and even the Oreshnik, which they can deploy to cover up their embarrassment.

But for now at least, Ukraine is celebrating a huge win.

---

Talks and Sanctions

As I write this, it’s 131 days since Donald Trump took office, promising to end the war in Ukraine in 100 days, and by most measures, we’re further from peace than when he started.

But there could be some positive movement in the coming days. Let’s begin this look back at the last two weeks by looking ahead to the next one.

Firstly, there could be big things happening in the US Senate this week. For a while now, there has been a bill on the cards that, if passed and enacted, would finally see the White House exerting the first real pressure on Russia since Trump took power.

The bill, led by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, would see sweeping new sanctions imposed on Moscow, including 500% tariffs on imports from countries who continue to purchase Russian products like oil, gas, and uranium.

One of the main aims is to target and deter countries that use Russia’s so-called “shadow fleet” to purchase oil and gas, particularly India and China.

If these two countries stopped purchasing Russian oil and gas, it would deprive the Kremlin of billions of dollars in revenue and severely affect its ability to not only wage war in Ukraine, but keep its economy afloat.

While the bill would still need Trump’s sign-off, which is by no means guaranteed, it’s worth noting just how much support it has.

Despite Trump’s reluctance so far to take any action against Russia, according to Graham, the bill has the support of 82 out of 100 US Senators — an encouraging reminder that Trump’s apparent fondness for Russian President Vladimir Putin isn’t entirely reflective of US politics as a whole.

Graham has said the Senate should “start moving” on the bill this coming week, in large part because of the other big thing that is happening — the second round of Ukraine-Russia peace talks in Istanbul on Monday.

What should we expect from these talks? Absolutely nothing.

After the first round, during which Russia gave up any pretence of wanting peace or a ceasefire, Trump and Putin had a call in which the Russian president said he would draft a “memorandum regarding a potential future peace treaty”.

This is as wishy-washy as it sounds, and the only person who seems to have seen it for anything but the stalling tactic it so obviously is was Trump, something which is causing ever-increasing frustrations in Kyiv.

“The fact the Americans believe that peace can be achieved through conversations is a dangerous sign,” one lawmaker told me after the call, adding: “We can only achieve peace if Russia sees that the whole world is united against their aggression and then they have to compromise.”

There’s nothing to suggest that Russia will back down from its maximalist demands whilst insisting that the war can only end when the “root causes” are addressed.

This term, “root causes”, is the flavour of the day in Kremlin propaganda and will no doubt be repeated endlessly over the coming weeks and months in a desperate attempt to spin the war as anything but the imperialist, genocidal, land-grabbing endeavour that it is.

Here’